Calendar Links

I do not list a lot of links. The reason is simply that most sites about Asian calendars contain a lot of dubious information. In particular, most calendar conversion programs involving the Chinese calendar on the web are unreliable.

You can find more links on my page about Heavenly Mathematics.

• Calendars in General
• The Chinese Calendar
• Calendars in Japan and Vietnam
• The Islamic Calendar
• The Indian Calendar
• General Astronomy

Calendars in General

• The most authoritative reference is Calendrical Calculations by Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If you need a calendar conversion program, the place to go is their Calendar Applet, which is part of their Calendrica 2.1 software package.
• Tadayoshi Funaba has translated the Lisp code from an earlier paper by Dershowitz and Reingold into C. This is now outdated.
• Before the book by Dershowitz and Reingold, the chapter about calendars by L. E. Doggett in the “Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac” was the standard reference.
• Hermetic Systems: Calendars, Encryption, Astronomy, Prime Numbers and More contains among other things the program Chinese Calendrics.
• The Calendar FAQ by Claus Tøndering.
• Calendars Through the Ages is part of the WebExhibits.
• The Worldwide Holiday & Festival Site has a page on the Chinese calendar and Chinese holidays.
• The Calendar Zone.
• CalendarHome.com.
• Time-reckoning in Iceland before literacy by Þorsteinn Vilhjálmsson.
• I'm originally from Norway, so I enjoyed the excellent article (in Danish) by Erling Poulsen about the calendar reform in Denmark/Norway in 1700 and 1743.

• My page on Calendars in Singapore.
• Honours project on Calendars in Singapore by my student Rachel Lee Tang Hwee.

The Chinese Calendar

• Zhuo Meng's Make Your Own Chinese Calendar is a wonderful tool!
• The Western-Chinese Calendar Converter page.
• Professor Bob Eng of the Asian Studies Program at the University of Redlands maintains an Annotated Directory of Net Resources on E &SE Asia. It includes a page on China: Science, Technology, &The Environment.
• Chinese Fortune Calendar.
• China the Beautiful has a page on Chinese New Year.
• The Chinese Calendar at ChineseCulture.info.
• Chinese Calendar Advertisment of the 1920s at China Gateway.

• My page on The Mathematics of the Chinese Calendar.
• Undergraduate research project on The Chinese Calendar of the Later Han Period by my students Kuan Shau Hong and Teng Keat Huat.
• Undergraduate research project on Calendars, Interpolation, Gnomons and Armillary Spheres in the Work of Guo Shoujing (1231-1314) by my student Ng Say Tiong.
• Undergraduate research project on Strings of Long Months and Short Months in the Chinese Calendar by my student Zhang Jieping.

Calendars in Japan and Vietnam

• The Lunar Calendar in Japan by Steve Renshaw and Saori Ihara is the best source for information about the Japanese calendar.
• Vietnamese lunar calendar conversion by Ho Ngoc Duc.

The Islamic Calendar

• Moonsighting.com by Khalid Shaukat.
• Dr. Monzur Ahmed is the author of MoonCalc, which for many years was the leading lunar visibility and Islamic calendar software. He has pages on Astronomy and Islam and Ramadhan (Ramadan) and Eid-al-Fitr.
• Islamic calendar for Singapore by Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS), the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore. MUIS seems to move the location of their calendar around from year to year. If the link doesn't work, go to their homepage and look under "Downloads" or do a search for Takwim (or Taqwim). This will give you MUIS's prediction for first visibility of the lunar crescent. But it is based on a dubious method, so you will often not be able to see the Moon on the day when MUIS claims that you will. Please see my page on The Islamic Calendar.
• Undergraduate research project on Lunar Visibility and the Islamic Calendar by my student Leong Wen Xin.
• Crescent Moon Visibility and the Islamic Calendar from the Astronomical Applications Department of the U.S. Naval Observatory.
• Crescent Section from the Jordanian Astronomical Society. Their section on The Actual Saudi Dating System is essential reading!
• Islamic Crescents' Observation Project.
• Moon Research Centre (U.K). The article on Policies Adopted in Britain by Muslims in Celebrating Islamic Festivals is essential reading! They also have a copy of the RGO Astronomical Information Sheet No. 6.
• Predicting the First Visibility of the Lunar Crescent, The Umm al-Qura Calendar of Saudi Arabia, Islamic-Western Calendar Converter (Based on the Arithmetical or Tabular Calendar) and Internet sites over de islamitische tijdrekening (in Dutch) by Robert H. van Gent.

• My page on The Islamic Calendar.

The Indian Calendar

• My page on The Indian calendars.
• Honours project on Indian Calendars by my student Leow Choon Lian.
• Undergraduate research project on Indian Calendars: Comparing the Surya Siddhanta and the Astronomical Ephemeris by my student Daphne Chia.

General Astronomy

For more information about astronomy, please go to my page on Heavenly Mathematics.

Back to Helmer Aslaksen's page on Calendars in Singapore.

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