Astronomy with Your Personal Computer

By Peter Duffett-Smith and Peter J. Duffett-Smith

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052138995X
• ISBN13: 9780521389952
• Release Date: June 1990
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Review of Astronomy With Your Personal Computer

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.

Excelent book with clearly commented source

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.

excelent but Sadly out of Time .

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.