Customer Reviews

Practical Astronomy with your Calculator

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For all stargazers who have university level math, and those equipped with lighter high school stuff, this book is a gem. In a few pages, and with nothing more than a pocket calculator, it allows you to explore the universe in a way which only a few hundred years ago was only possible with extensive state-support and massive buildings such as Stonehenge, state-sponsored observatories, and teams of pedantic astrologers and stargazers.

Starting from the simple building blocks (converting your local time to Universal time), it progresses to more and more complex calculations, until finally at the end, you can calculate eclipses and planetary orbits. All the formulas needed for doing this are given in the book, and explained in great detail with many diagrams. All relevant astronomical data is also given. And for every calculation, a sample example is carried out with real numbers, which you can trace along with, so by the end of it you understanding is complete, practically as well as theoretically.

A must read for any astronomy buff. I highly recommend it. It produces the information age equivalent of that feeling of satisfaction you get when you build a telescope and look out onto the heavens yourself--without any intermediaries. Astronomy and stargazing are the activities which were the genesis of the scientific revolution, more than 6000 years ago. This book shows you just how its done.

Don't be misled by the title. The recipes supplied by Peter Duffett-Smith are aimed at making calculations easier with a hand held calculator. However they are easily adapted for creating utilities on personal computers. The material should be easily handled by anyone whose completed highschool algebra and some trigonometry.

The organization and format is well thought out. The earliest chapters deal with time and coordinates which are used in the more complex problems such as computing planet positions later in the book.

Each concept is explained in straight forward language and conventional algebraic formulas are supplied. I found this especially useful for programmers using higher languages such as C,Pascal or Java. Then a step by step practical example is provided that is suitable for a scientific hand calculator. Duffett-Smith is careful about displaying units; a mindfield for most scientific calculations.

My only minor criticism is that some of the typos errors could leave a user quite frustrated. On pp108 I found the value of Tp=0.240850 gave the correct answer while the tabulated value is 0.240852. Similarly, I on page 129, after repeated checks, I got a value of 7.08...AU for Rho compared with the value of 8.13AU in the book. The text cites a 7.2AU value from the Astronomical Almanac.

Otherwise this is one neat addition to the bookshelf of any amateur astronomer of individual interested in astromical calculations.

Amateur astronomers will be able to solve a multitude of practical problems with this book. If you are short on funds and have time to explore, this is the book for you. It is well organized and reasonably complete.

The extremely concise - bordering on laconic - style poses the danger that some readers may become discouraged and will give up. The low price makes it a tempting entry-level book, but the terse explanations means you'll have to do a lot of digging, which is a cookbook recipe to discourage newcomers to a field.

I have two critiques of this otherwise excellent work.

1.) The formulae presented in this book are a little too "cookbook" in for my tastes.

2.) Further they are only weakly validated, so it is difficult to know how accurate the results are.

The cookbook nature provides little insight into the physical problem being solved. It did motivate me to buy and study Smart's "Spherical Astronomy". If you want more than superficial answers, you'll need to dig deeper.

Validation is rarely a problem for amateurs. Most people who buy this book will program the recipes on their home computers. (Most are readily amenable to treatment in spreadsheets.) So far, no problem. But how do you know whether or not your calculation of the position of Mars 60,000 ago is any good?

I think that Meeus and Montenbruck largely avoid these problems, but at a much higher selling price.

I use this book in my Astronomical observation class and it has helped understand some of the higher mathematical formulas involved in astronomical observing. You can understand it better if you have had some pre-calc/calculus exposure, but for the most part the formulas are well explained.

I am a Chinese from Hong Kong, China. I first read this book was on 1985 on Public Library, it the the only computational astronomy related book. At that time, I was being a secondary school student. This book I found is a very good on basic concept in positional astronomy and other fundamental knowledges concerning in basic ephemeris work. The English of this book is plain and be within the level of Hong Kong secondary school students. Starting from this book, I was being attracted on computational astronomy till now, recently I am in the way of writing of homepage of computational astronomy in Chinese, with the "practical astronomy with your calculator" as paradigm. I am so highly recommended this book.

This book is an excellent resource for quick-and-dirty formulas that are very commonly used. In particular, conversions between time and coordinate systems have been very useful. I use this book for particle astrophysics work -- I currently work for a university lab. My co-workers recommended this book to me, and I'm here recommending it to you. Absolutely essential as a quick reference. My only complaint is that the book covers a few time systems (for example, Julian time), but does not give any useful conversion formulas for them. However, the coverage of coordinate systems is quite extensive.

I have not used the later chapters which cover objects in our local system, but I imagine they would be very useful to the amateur astronomer. Unfortunately, the book does not explicitly cover objects outside the local system, but gives you all the formula's you need: simply find the object's right ascension and declination in some online catalog somewhere (there are hundreds of extensive catalogs available for free) and, using the provided formulas, convert into coordinates you can use with your telescope.

Overall, *very* useful for the experimentalist or amateur astronomer.

This is an excellant book for starting of computational astronomy. I read this book when I was being a secondary school student (at 1985). This book can give me clear and fundamental idea and concept required for computational astronomy, eg, time, coordinates. The English and mathematics involved is within the reach of secondary school student.
I am highly recommending this book.

Heavy on getting you the answer and light on the specifics of the theory behind getting you there, Practical Astronomy with your Calculator does exactly what the author purports -- gives you a simple set of equations that will tell you the wheres and whens of astronomical phenomena.

This is a very good book. You have short explanation and practical application in calculating celestial coordinate transformation,calendar transformation, planets position,eclipse etc. and even precession phenomena. For this latter, elementary knowledge of matrix calculation would be helpful: in any case without going through matrix theory the practicals rules in how to handle them are given.
I strongly advise this book to anybody interested in practical and easy calculation (with high accuracy) of the most important astronomical phenomena.

I've been through all three editions and spent hundreds of hours with this book. There are a few areas in the calculations where ambiguities lie and at one point I wrote the author c/o cambridge univ. for clarification on these. That was 3 years ago and as of yet no response. where are you Duffet-Smith? Anyway, thank you for all the hours of enjoyment.