I have a love of astronomy, and combined with my love for programming, that creates in me that burning ambition to try and use both these passions together. This is where this book is invaluable.
Practical Astronomy with your Calculator is a very useful books to figure out how to calculate just about every astronomical phenomena which can be calculated from solar eclipses to the phase and location of the moon, to finding the positions of the planets at any given time.
Now, this book is aimed at calculating using a calculator, so the algorithms are slightly simplified to make that task easier, and therefore the precision of the calculations is not as great as if the algorithms had ben designed purely for a computer, but for most calculations this level of accuracy is more than sufficient.
The advantage of this method though, is that each step is very clearly laid out in the calculation, so that it is very easy to understand.
I have used this book extensively in writing an astronomical calculation application, which I will soon make available for download, and has proven indespensible to me.
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