The Authors of the Swiss Ephemeris

Dieter Koch (June 4, 1959), lic.phil., graduated in 1984 from Zurich University with a masters degree in Philosophy, Sanskrit and Classical Greek. Studies in astrology and astronomy since 1987. In 1995, Dieter joined Astrodienst and has worked since as a programmer on the Swiss Ephemeris and several other projects of Astrodienst.
Dieter has published books on the astronomy and astral mythology of the Star of Bethlehem and of the Gilgamesh Epic, a Critique of Astrological Reason, and a commented translation of the Bhagavadgita. (all in German)
For more information, see his website www.gilgamesh.ch.

Alois Treindl (March 7, 1950), founder and director of Astrodienst AG, graduated in 1981 from ETH Zurich with a doctorate in Physics. He created the planetary calculation package PLACALC in 1988. In 1993 he started designing the Swiss Ephemeris project, which went under full steam in 1996 and was released in September 1997. These planetary calculation routines are used by many astrological programmers in the world. Alois is best known for the Astro*Intelligence Reports he developed jointly with Liz Greene.

(The scientific contributors below are not involved in astrology in any respect.)

Dr. Standish is the head of the JPL ephemeris project upon which the Swiss Ephemeris is based. He has been very helpful in providing releases of his data and valuable advise. He also gave permission to include the JPL data files in the distribution of the Swiss Ephemeris. Steve Moshier specializes in high precision numerical computation. He has made available a lot of astronomical software to the public on his website. Astrodienst has licensed some of his code for the Swiss Ephemeris project and uses his numerical integration programs for computing asteroid orbits and extended planetary ephemerides. Peter Kammeyer developed the compression techniques which we have used for reducing the volume of the JPL data by a factor of 20 while keeping a precision of 0.001 arcsec. Victor Reijs works in the environment of archaeocosmology: The possible use of the sky and/or landscape in (pre-)historic times. Part of his work is implementing Bradley Schaefer's criterion for determining heliacal events. Reijs' programm code for heliacal events, originally written in VBA, was translated into C and integrated into the Swiss Ephemeris.

Other authors whose data we have used are mentioned in the various documentation files or in the source files.