Xref: utzoo sci.astro:1620 comp.sys.ibm.pc:9617 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!think!ames!ucbcad!zen!ucla-cs!wales From: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU Newsgroups: sci.astro,comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Looking for astronomical software Message-ID: <9916@shemp.UCLA.EDU> Date: 15 Dec 87 22:56:13 GMT Sender: root@CS.UCLA.EDU Reply-To: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) Organization: UCLA CS Department, Los Angeles Lines: 32 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."