Customer Reviews

Astronomy with your Personal Computer

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I own the original 1985 printing. I bought it for use on my AppleII+ probably back in 1985.
All the code is written for very basic BASIC. Yes, it is all suppose to be written as ONE program. The code routines all use GOSUB's. None of it is written for todays BASIC, or even older Basics like QuickBasic. Trying to translate or port the routines to todays languages is nearly impossible. First, it only supports Integer numbers, no floating point, so there is high inaccuracies in the calculations.
You would spend more time trying to translate this code then you would going it from scratch.

This book is too outdated to be of any use on todays computer languages. It was great in its day - it's useless now.

Although the book covers a great range of astronomical programs, its psudo-code doesn't make for easy translation into other landuages like C++ or Pascal. He goes through the program one by one, but one can't help but feel it was ment to writen as one big program. Not for the novice astronomer or programmer.

I bought this book out of curiosity, and found the functions fun to play with. I ported some of them to 16bit assembly language and had to make a floating point adder as this book uses a lot of real type numbers. However, the code may not run in newer Basic compilers like Qbasic as the syntax is more for AppleIIe/Commodore 64 basics. So some porting will be necessary.

Good set of astronomical algorithms and GWBASIC code for them + explanations. Code would need to be converted into a more modern language, but the algorithms are just as valid. Of course, more extensive and precise algorithms exist, but these are a good optimization of simplicity and accuracy.

As the book "astronomy with a calculator" this book lacks the concept of tracking outside our solar system (other stars and galaxies). The fact that BASIC is used is almost bad, a better language to display science in is Pascal or now Delphi.