The present work is a greatly revised version of the former one.
Because these "personal computers" were not yet within reach of everybody, the aforesaid book was written mainly for the users of pocket calculating machines and therefore calculation methods requiring a large amount of computer memory, or many steps in a program, were avoided as far as possible, or kept to a minimum. But astronomical algorithms changes all that With his special knack for computations of all sorts, the author has made the essentials of thesemodern techniques available to us all.From the Book: When, in 1978, I wrote the first (Belgian) edition of my astronomical Formulae for Calculators, the industry of microcomputers was just starting its worldwide expansion. The details have existed mainly on reels of magnetic tape in a form comprehensible only to the largest brains, human or electronic. Yet until now the fruits of this exciting work have remained mostly out of reach of ordinary people.
at the same time in Paris, the Bureau des Longitudes has been a beehive of activity aimed at describing these motions analytically, in the form of explicit equations. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., have perfected powerful new machine methods for modeling the motions and interactions of bodies within the solar system. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the U.S. The past 10 years, however, have seen a stunning revolution in how the world's major observatories produce their almanacs. Many of them have warmly acknowledged their debt (or should have), citing the unparalleled clarity of his instructions and the rigor of his methods.Īnd now this Belgian astronomer has outdone himself yet again! Virtually every previous handbook on celestial calculations (including his own earlier work) was forced to rely on formulae for the Sun, Moon, and planets that were developed in the last century-or at least before 1920. It quickly became the "source among sources," even for other writers in the field. When he brought out his astronomical Formulae for Calculators in 1979, it was practically the only book of its genre. In the field of celestial calculations, Jean Meeus has enjoyed wide acclaim and respect since long before microcomputers and pocket calculators appeared on the market.
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