In 1730 James Stirling, building on the work of Abraham de Moivre, published what is known as Stirlings approximation of $n!$. He gave a good formula which is asymptotic to $n!$. Since then hundreds of papers have given alternative proofs of his result and improved upon it, including notably by Burside, Gosper, and Mortici. However Srinivasa Ramanujan gave a remarkably better asymptotic formula. Hirschhorn and Villarino gave a nice proof of Ramanujans result and an error estimate for the approximation. In recent years there have been several improvements of Stirlings formula including by Nemes, Windschitl, and Chen. Here it is shown (i) how all these asymptotic results can be easily verified; (ii) how Hirschhorn and Villarinos argument allows a tweaking of Ramanujans result to give a better approximation; (iii) that a new asymptotic formula can be obtained by further tweaking of Ramanujans result; (iv) that Chens asymptotic formula is better than the others mentioned here, and the new asymptotic formula is comparable with Chens.
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