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Ask HN: Which astronomy textbook for beginners?

by AlphaGeekZulu on 7/9/24, 12:46 PM with 5 comments

I am currently trying to do (yet another) Rust implementation of the formulas in Jean Meeus' fantastic book "Astronomical Algorithms" (2nd ed. 1998).

I am fighting two issues:

1. While it is possible to code the algorithms as a non-astronomer with the information provided in the book, I would definitely want to understand much better what it is all about.

2. I am afraid, that the book is a little bit outdated by now. Many of the tables provided with astronomical data only run until 2025. Some important standards like WGS84 are not mentioned (actually I cannot determine what elipsoid the calculations are referring to). The sign of geographical longitudes for the Earth is turned around in the book (positive for West and negative for East), for reasons, which makes some algorithms IMO really dangerous to use in a real-world context.

Can you recommend any good astronomy "familiarization manual", that is feasible for absolute beginners, but goes deep enough with serious number crunching? In English or German language...

  • by EdwardCoffin on 7/9/24, 7:55 PM

    The topic of the currency of Meeus's book came up on stack exchange [1]. The consensus seems to be that there's no replacement yet, but that there are some better ephemerides available - but figuring out how to use those rather than the ones in the book is difficult for someone not familiar with this stuff (like me).

    [1] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/53967/modern-e...

  • by EdwardCoffin on 7/9/24, 6:06 PM

    I have the same Meeus book. It's been a while since I read it, but my impression was the signs of longitudes being turned around was not unique to his book, but was rather a convention throughout astronomy, so you could expect to find whatever other books you're recommended would have the same convention.

    When I was contemplating my own implementation from that book my sketchy API design just included a mandatory extra parameter to accompany such numbers, which would explicitly indicate whether the astronomical or other sign convention was to be used.

  • by AlphaGeekZulu on 7/11/24, 1:08 PM

    Thanks for the hints. I ordered two promising books in German language:

    "Astronomie" by Pearson and "Astronomie in Theorie und Praxis" (3 volumes) by Erik Wischnewski. Thats some 2000 pages of stuff to read, so let's see where this takes me.

  • by tizio13 on 7/9/24, 5:13 PM

    I would also like to add my interest for this same topic.