Houston, we have a problem! (Sorry, you knew I had to say that eventually.)
But seriously ... I did double-check my Starry Night data against the AlphaCentaure screen shots, and they DO NOT JIBE. Sorry for the poor quality of the screenshot in some places, but you can read it if you look close. I did.
Now, here's the thing. This is why I became a serious, dedicated skeptic a few years back. In general, we do not experience things first-hand. We get told about them, we get data from sources that are at best first or second hand but sometimes have gone through the-Devil-knows-whose hands (and agendas). Where did Starry Night and AlphaCentaure get their epoch tables and algorithms? Who wrote the calculation functions? WHOM SHALL WE TRUST?
I think I will download a couple of those other freeware astro proggies and see if I can get some other reports for planetary positions in September 15605. But ... still ... same question: whom do we trust? Maybe half of those programs are using a particular set of data or formulae that contain errors, and even though I get shown the same thing by 3 programs, they're all wrong. You know, like, "Oh sure, that's because of the Schmarks dataset from 1982, everybody knows he was getting a divorce and he had a drug problem, he totally screwed up his math, but it got printed in the journals before anybody caught it and printed retractions and corrections, and people who don't know any better are STILL using those tables, there must be a hundred astronomy programs out there that don't work because of this data -- they're all wrong! LOL!" ... And let's not leave out the fact that I, as cosmically aware and infallible as I am, might not even have used the programs correctly.
I am probably going to trust Starry Night simply because it's more evolved. It just looks more trustworthy. I know that means basically nothing. But at some piont, you just have to decide whom to trust, and just move on.
Here's how the planets compare between my Starry Night ecliptic longitudes and my Alpha Centaure screenshots ...
Mercury pretty close
Venus pretty close
Earth pretty close
Mars a little off
Jupiter way off
Saturn way off
Uranus pretty close
Neptune pretty close
Pluto way off
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