stepl : Recent Updates

12th September 2008

ECa library has 4 new book titles on eclipses as under. These books will be added in our online library soon.

1. CELESTIAL HIDE AND SEEK: The Game of Eclipses

Nirupama Raghavan 72 pp Rs 30.00. One of the most mysterious games played by nature are eclipses. Played by the sun, the moon and the earth these eclipses explain a host of natural phenomena affecting our lives on earth. This interesting book with some excellent illustrations and photographs unravels their mystery and also a few tips to predict the eclipse. A book that every child must possess. ISBN 81-237-1984-1

2. Mathematical Astronomical Morsels III: Mathematical Astronomical Morsels 3 (Hardcover) by Jean Meeus

Publisher: Willmann-Bell (November 2004)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0943396816

Welcome, once again, to the crossroads where astronomy, mathematics, and arcane knowledge meet. In this third volume of his Morsels series, Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus deals masterfully with a host of new questions about eclipses and planetary conjunctions — things that anyone from a curious child to a serious skywatcher might wonder about. The sky’s rhythms are not strictly repetitive, as he proves time and again by finding entertaining quirks in the motions of the Moon and planets.

In his Preface to Mathematical Morsels III Jean Meeus writes: We are living in a period of important astrophysical and cosmological research. Many astronomical journals and scientific books deal with subjects such as birth and evolution of stars, black holes, dark matter, gamma-ray bursts, supernova remnants or collisions between galaxies. Of course this is important matter, but one almost seems to have forgotten the `old' astronomy, the classical, mathematical science of the sky. And yet, without this fundamental astronomy modern research on the universe new would never have been possible.

This book contains Besselian elements for the 570 solar eclipses during the 250 years between 1951 and 2200. The elements were calculated using highly accurate modern theories of the Sun and Moon developed at the Bureau des Longitudes of Paris. This is the first readily available computation of Besselian elements to use these theories. Formulae are provided for the calculation of local circumstances, points of the central line or the northern and southern limits, etc. These algorithms can easily be programmed on a home computer and checked against numerical examples included in this book.