A Nautical Almanac in Excel

The nautical almanac is pretty cool (and is utterly vital for celestial navigation). It's pretty intimidating at first glance--a several-hundred page book filled almost entirely with figures and abbreviations. But once you learn how to use it, it's pretty magnificent. It'll tell you the exact geographical position of any celestial object at any day of the year (geographical position can be thought of as the latitude and longitude where you would have to stand to have a given object be directly overhead). If you take a few sights of the sun with a watch and a sextant, that can tell you your exact position on the Earth (a process called a noon curve). Throw in some air navigation tables, and you can use any star at anytime anywhere on the planet and, with a bit of practice, figure out where you are to well inside a mile of accuracy.

However, we've been working on a few problems involving varying times of sunset at varying latitudes, and that's something for which the nautical almanac is (for once) pretty intuitively easy to use. What good is this to someone who isn't a giant nerd like me and has one on his shelf? If you're trying to solve any similar problems, lots! All thanks to some wonderful denizen of the internet who has put together an excel spreadsheet that  functions as a nautical almanac for the full year--just plug in the day you're interested in (and if you're looking for sunset and sunrise times, your latitude and longitude) and it spits out everything you need (well, almost everything--it doesn't have the separate tables for planets and the moon that a physical NA would). Here's a screenshot, and the link to download is below:

link