There are many, many people who, often unknowingly, contributed to making the Lunar Occultation Workbench what it is today. First of all I’d like to mention Adri Gerritsen who, being the first in the Netherlands to have calculated lunar occultation using the theories of Chapront, kindly supplied me with his C source code for the prediction calculations back in 1993. He has always provided me with any extra information I required, especially debug information to check the correctness of the values generated by our code. Other kind contributors were:

• Wolfgang Zimmermann
• Dr. David Dunham
• Dr. Mitsura Soma
• David Herald

For their work on the various editions of the XZ80 and XZ94 star catalogues. The Watts database would never have existed if it were not for Dr. C.B. Watts. However, numerous observations of (grazing) occultations have helped to improve our knowledge of the lunar limb. Prof. Dr. Hans-Helmut Cuno, Dietmar Büttner and Rheinhold Büchner used this information to significantly enhance the value of the original Watts database into was has now become the MOONLIMB+ database. They too deserve praise.

For painstakingly testing the software I’d like to thank:

• Dick Stulp
• Henk Bril
• Harrie Rutten
• Hans Govaarts
• Tom Tenbergen
• Jan Maarten Winkel
• Adri Gerritsen.

For version 4.1 I’d like to thank in particular:

• Erwin van Ballegoij
• Marek Zawilski
• Pawel Maksym
• Dr. Tony Cook
• Oliver Klös

For their input.

All of you have made a valuable contribution to making LOW what it is now. The many others to whom I feel grateful are Mr. and Mrs. Chapront for their theory of lunar motion ELP2000-85, Jean Meeus for his classic textbook on Astronomical Algorithms, and the great names of astronomy (..., Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, ...) who sought to explain and predict the heavenly motions of solar system bodies. It is the combined knowledge and effort of so many individuals that has made the production of the Lunar Occultation Workbench possible. Their priceless effort humbles me considerably. It is to them all, and to you, the reader and user of LOW that I dedicate this program.

Eric Limburg

29 August 2009

Your Dutch Occultation Association

Observing occultations for over 60 years