Celestial Basic: Astronomy on Your Computer

by Eric Burgess

Bring the planetarium into your home
Explore the universe through your computer—no more hunting for your almanac, digging up that elusive astronomical magazine, or sitting down for hours of laborious calculations on your pocket calculator. This book offers programs that are useful to the serious amateur astronomer as well as the occasional stargazer. The programs convert time from one system of measurement to another, calculate and display the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars for any date at any boation. teach you to recognize the constellations, and more. Knowledge of the stars and solar system is at your fingertips in Celestial BASIC.

"The beauty of author Eric Burgess's approach is that his programs don't just print the results of the calculations—they display them graphically on the computer's monitor... a fascinating and extremely useful book..." Mike Higgins, Computer Graphics World

300 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1982

About the author

Eric Burgess (1920 – March 2005) was an English freelance consultant, lecturer and journalist, who wrote about the Pioneer program of space missions since the first tests in 1957. He was the science correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor in the period of many of the planetary probe launches, and was often the senior science reporter present at many of those events.

Burgess was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and British Interplanetary Society, and an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is credited with the original idea that the Pioneer probes should carry a message for extraterrestrial intelligences. He approached Carl Sagan about his idea, which eventually resulted in the Pioneer plaque.