We had some discussions about this conversion a while back. Just wanted to let you know that there is a really nice perl module to do this calculation now thanks to Robert Creager with help from Patrick Wallace. It is accurate, fast and easy to use (if you are comfortable with Perl). The module is called Astro::Time::HJD and it is linked here: http://vsnet.logicalchaos.org/perl/ I don't recall whether Robert announced this on these lists or not, so I hope I'm not being redundant. Below is a little perl script I wrote that will do the calculation for a file of observations. It demonstrates how easy this is to use. Cheers, Michael Koppelman http://vsnetlolife.com/astronomy/ #!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; use Astro::Time::HJD qw( correction ); my $ra = $ARGV[0]; my $dec = $ARGV[1]; my $file = $ARGV[2]; if( ! $ra || ! $dec || ! $file ) { print "usage: $0 ra dec filename\n"; exit; } open( FILE, $file ) || die "Can't open $file: $!\n"; while( my $line = <FILE> ) { chop( $line ); my( $jd, @data ) = split( /\s+/, $line ); if( $jd !~/^\d/ ) { next; } $jd += correction( $jd, $ra, $dec ); print "$jd"; foreach my $d (@data ) { print " $d"; } print "\n"; } exit(0);