Practical Astronomy with your Calculator or Spreadsheet

Abstract

Now in its fourth edition, this highly regarded book is ideal for those who wish to solve a variety of practical and recreational problems in astronomy using a scientific calculator or spreadsheet. Updated and extended, this new edition shows you how to use spreadsheets to predict, with greater accuracy, solar and lunar eclipses, the positions of the planets, and the times of sunrise and sunset. Suitable for worldwide use, this handbook covers orbits, transformations and general celestial phenomena, and is essential for anyone wanting to make astronomical calculations for themselves. With clear, easy-to-follow instructions for use with a pocket calculator, shown alongside worked examples, it can be enjoyed by anyone interested in astronomy, and will be a useful tool for software writers and students studying introductory astronomy. High-precision spreadsheet methods for greater accuracy are available at www.cambridge.org/practicalastronomy.

Amplitude of solar wind density turbulence from 10 to 45 R⊙

“…Crab occultation is a very well established technique that has been in use since the 1950s [Hewish, 1957[Hewish, , 1958Hewish and Wyndham, 1963;Erickson, 1964;Sastry and Subramanian, 1974], giving us the advantage of a standard observational quantity to draw inferences from. IPS observations at microwave frequencies probe the inner solar wind [Ekers and Little, 1971;Yamauchi et al, 1998;Imamura et al, 2014]. This technique is also best suited for turbulence density estimates in the ≈ 10-50 R ⊙ heliocentric distance range.…”

“…Density turbulence in solar wind has been studied using techniques ranging from angular broadening of radio sources [e.g., Armstrong et al, 1990;Janardhan and Alurkar, 1993;Anantharamaiah et al, 1994;Bastian, 1994;Spangler and Sakurai, 1995;] to spectral broadening [Coles and Harmon, 1989], phase scintillations [Woo and Armstrong, 1979], interplanetary (intensity) scintillations (IPS) [Hewish et al, 1964;Cohen and Gundermann, 1969;Ekers and Little, 1971;Rickett, 1990;Manoharan et al, 2000;Bisi et al, 2009Bisi et al, , 2010Tokumaru et al, 2012Tokumaru et al, , 2016 due to celestial radio sources, and spacecraft radio beacons [Imamura et al, 2014]. Despite this impressive body of work, there are still significant gaps in our understanding.…”

“…The IPS technique at low frequencies usually probes heliocentric distances > 40-50 R ⊙ . IPS observations at microwave frequencies probe the inner solar wind [Ekers and Little, 1971;Yamauchi et al, 1998;Imamura et al, 2014]. Nonetheless, extensive studies of density turbulence amplitude and density modulation index and their solar cycle dependence were still lacking.…”

Actave.net – a web‐based tool for the analysis of seabird activity patterns from saltwater immersion geolocators

“…Twilight length is calculated as decimal hours between begin of morning twilight and end of evening twilight and therefore includes daylight hours. Determination of sunrise and twilight times is based on algorithms implemented in the PHP Hypertext Pre‐processor programming language (version 5.3.2, function ‘date_sun_info’, The PHP Group ), which itself uses the generalized sunrise equation (Duffett‐Smith & Zwart ).…”

Gaspra - software for astronomical image processing in high-performance computing clusters

“…We should standardize these data to provide access information for the coordinate system. The standardization process consists in conversion of all Right Ascension (RA) positions in decimal hours and Declination (DEC) in degrees, following conversions described in [12].…”