wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (12/16/87)
I am looking for information regarding astronomical software for the IBM PC. (I have a Taiwanese "turbo" XT clone.) As a second choice, I might be satisfied with something written in C for the Sun or VAX. The kind of thing I'm thinking of is a program (or set of programs) to do calculations of the sort found in Jean Meeus's book _Astronomical_ _Formulae_for_Calculators_ -- particularly, positions of the sun, moon, and planets (plus phases of the moon) at various times. I want to be able to calculate positions and phases for times of up to a few thousand years in the past. For a software package to be useful to me, therefore, it must be as accurate as possible for these distant dates. Also, I particularly need a formula for the Equation of Time that takes precession of the equinoxes into account. Needless to say, whatever formulae are used by a given package must be very well documented (so that, if appropriate, I could cite the results in professional research). If all else fails, I could sit down and write such a package myself from scratch (based on, for instance, the Meeus book mentioned above). How- ever, I'd vastly prefer not to have to do this. Please send me e-mail; I'll send a followup summary to the net if I hear of anything useful. -- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA wales@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!(ucbvax,rutgers)!ucla-cs!wales "Sir, there is a multilegged creature crawling on your shoulder."