fred@inuxe.UUCP (Fred Mendenhall) (08/09/85)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** For those of you who are interested in writing your own Astronomical software, I can recommend two books: 1. Astronomical Formulae for Pocket Calculators by Jean Mesus (sp? might be Meesus) 2. Orbits for Amateurs with a Microcomputer by D. Tattersfield Neither book presents the theory of orbital mechanics but rather concentrates on the necessary algorithms. As such they are language independent. Tattersfield, however, does give example programs in Basic. The first book gives techniques for finding the positions of the planets, moon, moon phases, positions of Jupiters moons, etc., in any coordinate system you want. Also included are methods for determining the positions of asteroids and comets given the orbital elements. The sections I have programmed turned out to be impressively accurate, but to get that accuracy a lot of terms need to be entered and the programming task is very tedious. The second book deals with only elliptical and parabolic orbits around the sun. Great for Comet and Asteroid orbits, and it is the only place where I have seen a decent presentation of the reverse problem of finding the orbital elements from observational data. From my view both of these books are far more useful than the half dozen "Celestial Basic" type books that are out on the book shelves. Fred Mendenhall just for you Matt........AT&T IS-CPLOB