Practical Astronomy with your Calculator, 3ed
By addebook • Jul 15th, 2008 • Category: Astronomy & Geography •
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Practical Astronomy with your Calculator, 3ed
by Peter Duffett-Smith
Practical Astronomy with your Calculator
By Peter Duffett-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Number Of Pages: 200
Publication Date: 1988-03-31
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0521356997
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780521356992
Binding: Paperback
In its first two editions, Practical Astronomy With Your Calculator enjoyed tremendous success. Using clear and logical
Summary: Loved it!
Rating: 5
If you’re into astronomy and like to fly by the seat of your pants, this is your book. Combine it with a good reference, like Burnham’s Celestial Handbook.
Summary: Turn the crank
Rating: 4
Heavy on getting you the answer and light on the specifics of the theory behind getting you there, Practical Astronomy with your Calculator does exactly what the author purports — gives you a simple set of equations that will tell you the wheres and whens of astronomical phenomena.
Summary: Awesome introduction to Astronomy
Rating: 5
I read this book way back in 1989 in India at IIT library,
and implemented it in Turbo pascal on 8086/DOS.
It provides explanations of coordinate systems, time, date,
and calculations. Very well written, this is what Astronomy
was about, if you have read NEWTON’s principia, or wondered
what Gauss did.
Check out Xephem (Free astronomy program for linux/X with source
code in C), Alw.exe (Astronomy lab almanac generator/DOS), if you want instant answers.
I also use Redshift 4, and starry nights on my pc to get
the star maps.
- Mosh http://www.cs.albany.edu/~mosh
Summary: Excellent Value at $11.80
Rating: 4
Amateur astronomers will be able to solve a multitude of practical problems with this book. If you are short on funds and have time to explore, this is the book for you. It is well organized and reasonably complete.
The extremely concise - bordering on laconic - style poses the danger that some readers may become discouraged and will give up. The low price makes it a tempting entry-level book, but the terse explanations means you’ll have to do a lot of digging, which is a cookbook recipe to discourage newcomers to a field.
I have two critiques of this otherwise excellent work.
1.) The formulae presented in this book are a little too “cookbook” in for my tastes.
2.) Further they are only weakly validated, so it is difficult to know how accurate the results are.
The cookbook nature provides little insight into the physical problem being solved. It did motivate me to buy and study Smart’s “Spherical Astronomy”. If you want more than superficial answers, you’ll need to dig deeper.
Validation is rarely a problem for amateurs. Most people who buy this book will program the recipes on their home computers. (Most are readily amenable to treatment in spreadsheets.) So far, no problem. But how do you know whether or not your calculation of the position of Mars 60,000 ago is any good?
I think that Meeus and Montenbruck largely avoid these problems, but at a much higher selling price.
Summary: Very good book
Rating: 5
This is a very good book. You have short explanation and practical application in calculating celestial coordinate transformation,calendar transformation, planets position,eclipse etc. and even precession phenomena. For this latter, elementary knowledge of matrix calculation would be helpful: in any case without going through matrix theory the practicals rules in how to handle them are given.
I strongly advise this book to anybody interested in practical and easy calculation (with high accuracy) of the most important astronomical phenomena.
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