Simple Practical Astronomy {#mainpage}

[TOC]

Introduction

Simple Practical Astronomy is a C++ implementation of the astronomical algorithms presented by Peter Duffet-Smith in Practical Astronomy With Your Calculator @cite pawyc_1988.

Although those algorithms lack the accuracy of the modern solutions presented in the Astronomical Almanac @cite ast_almanac_2009, or the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac @cite exp_sup_2013, they have a pedagogical value in being much simpler and easier to understand. To quote Richard Hamming, "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

Having used professional-level libraries such as SOFA, NOVAS, ERFA, other implementations of unknown provenance, and partial implementations of Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms @cite meeus_1998, I was motivated to create an implementation of PAWYC in order to be able to obtain:

• The difference in accuracy of these other libraries, compared to the simplest possible algorithm
• The lowest possible computational cost implementation for a given algorithm
• A baseline, first-order-accurate, answer for any interesting value in order to have a sanity check on whether code using some other library is working correctly

Implementation Status

The @ref pawyc_sections table contains a list of the sections defined in Practical Astronomy With Your Calculator and their implementation status in Simple Practical Astronomy. The repository TODO file also provides a roadmap of what has been implementated and future plans by release.

Dependencies

This library requires the user to have a working C++11 compiler. At present, and by design, no external dependencies (e.g. boost) are required.

Build And Test

Refer to the build instructions on how to build the library and its tests. Development and testing has only been done on Fedora Linux and OSX 10.11 systems, so it whether it works on other *nix systems is unknown although there is no reason to expect it to fail.