KAIROS 4.0

The program Kairos 4.0 is a general calendar conversion program designed to meet the needs of historians of astronomy, general historians, and anyone who needs to interpret the dates found in historical sources. Historians of astronomy are so often required to convert dates from one calendar to another that they would now naturally look for software designed to make this easy and straightforward.

The name of the program is taken from the Greek word καιρός ,meaning time; the icon is the symbol used in Byzantine texts to represent the conjunction of Sun and Moon.

Have a look at the beautiful sundial on Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire

Kairos designed to run on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4., Win 2000, or XP. The General View shows the screen with some of the available displays.

The program is centred on the list of the principle Calendars. When you select the calendar that drives the program the correct months appear.The time is assigned by typing in the year, etc, but is advanced and retarded at the press of a button. Supplementary windows give further details for  Hebrew, Indian, Persian and Chinese calendars, for the positions of Sun, Moon and planets, astrological houses, horoscope , lunar visibility , and the details of  the Latin Easter calculation; the  Mayan calendar.

There are features new to version 4:

The display takes full advantage of Unicode in the display of the month names

There is a treatment of solar and lunar eclipses.

The Bactrian calendar is added to the group of Persian calendars

The eclipse display is accessed through the Lunation menu. This leads to a map displaying the path of a total eclipse, which includes also a mouse driven window hat shows the appearance of the eclipse at any point of the earth.

Here  is the forthcoming eclipse of Aug 1, total near Beijing.

While some calendars require no more than simple integer-based algorithms, others are dependent on floating point calculations from either modern parameters or from earlier canons. Computations from modern parameters depend on the recently developed semi-analytical solutions VSOP87 for Sun and planets, and on ELP-2000. for the Moon. These are truncated, but without detriment to the precision required in historical research. Medieval parameters are used in the Indian calendars, within a choice of six canons. The Chinese date is computed by the true conjunction calculated from modern parameters.

The Babylonian Calendar appears in two forms, once with the intercalary months as given by Parker and Dubberstein, limited to the years -625 to 76, and again with the regular intercalary months calculated for any year. The dates of visibility are computed from the modern luni-solar program, together with Yallop’s condition for lunar visibility; the window shows the stages before full visibility on the evenings following the conjunction.

A bitmap image of any one of the windows, or of the screen as a whole, may be sent to the printer, or pasted into another window.

The Help file provides succinct accounts of the various calendars.

The cost of the Kairos 4.0 is 30 GBP. Ordinary American checques can be handled without surcharge. I will before long arrange payment by Paypal.

Please try the Demo version, fully functional, but limited to 90 days.

Once you have tried Kairos you will wonder how you ever managed without it !

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