Astronomy with your Personal Computer (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The handling programs in this book, whose names all begin with the letter H (e.g. HEQECL, HALTAZ, etc.) require the user to supply answers to..." (more)
Key Phrases: geocentric ecliptic longitude, local civil time, call local routine, The Astronomical Almanac, Comet Kohler, Convert Julian (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a work which all amateur astronomers will want to possess." Times Higher Education Supplement

"This is one of the best publications of its type on the market today. The book is well written and illustrated. It is highly recommended." Journal of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers

"...an example of how wonderful a tool a computer and a few programs can be. With the subroutines in this book, the amateur astronomer can have more time to concentrate on the heavens and leave the earthly work of astronomical computations to the computer....a good sourcebook for those amateur astronomers who are not afraid of some simple programming or for getting someone who is familiar with programming interested in astronomy. It could be useful to those who want more accuracy in their space games." William H. MacIntosh, Computing Reviews

Product Description

The first edition of this very successful book was a winner of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's "Astronomy Book of the Year" award in 1986. The popularity of the book's programs is based on the ease with which the amateur astronomer can perform calculations on a personal computer. The routines are not specific to any make of computer and are user-oriented in that they utilize a simple version of the BASIC programming language and require only a broad understanding of any particular problem. Seven new subroutines in this new edition can be linked in any combination with the existing twenty-six. Since the programs themselves take care of details, they can be used, for example, to calculate the time of rising of any of the planets in any part of the world at any time in the future or past, or they may be used to find the circumference of the next solar eclipse visible from a particular place. In fact, almost every problem likely to be encountered by the amateur astronomer can be solved by a suitable combination of the routines given in this book. Peter Duffett-Smith is the author of another popular astronomy book: Astronomy with Your Calculator (3rd Edition), also published by Cambridge University Press.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (June 29, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052138995X
• ISBN-13: 978-0521389952
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #880,465 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I can't believe this book is still available, March 26, 2006

By	Robert A. Flickinger (Woodstock, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excelent book with clearly commented source , September 22, 2008

By	Christopher R. Evans (Sacramento, CA., USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars excelent but Sadly out of Time ., December 26, 1999

By	Paul Pierce (Ireland) - See all my reviews

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.