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NOTES.TXT
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1990-04-06
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Program name: Moonbeam (V1.0)
Author name: Fred T. Mendenhall
Address: 2209 Tam-O-Shanter Ct.
Carmel, IN 46032
Telephone Number:NONE
Suggested Donation:$5.00
Program Description:
Moonbeam is a nifty little software tool geared toward the
amateur and the professional astronomer. This program gets any
date, time and North American time zone and immediately outputs a
lot of statistical information about the moon. It indicates the
surface percentage of the visible moon, the angles of ascension
and declination, the azimuth, ets. Once these facts have been
displayed, you are prompted as to whether you want a graphic
diagram of the night sky. If you have a monochrome or color
graphics card you will be able to display the starchart. If you
have answered 'Y' to the prompt, you are then asked to what
degree you would like the stars plotted. Entering a degree of 1
causes only the most brightly lit star≤ to be plotted and on the
other end of the spectrum you can enter a 7. I might warn you
that entering the 7 will cause the output to be generated in
about 5 minutes. The moon is also displayed, of course. The
star chart may be printed by pressing the shft-PrtSc keys to-
gether, provided you have a graphics printer. The star charts are
contained in a database file provided by the Yale Observatory.
This program requires a minimum of 128K RAM. Additionally, the
graphic hardware will be needed to get the star chart displays.
Program name: Sunset
Author name: NONE
Address: NONE
Telephone Number: NONE
Suggested Donation:NONE
Program Description:
This appears to be a simple, but useful program for the amateur
astronomer and possibly a number of other people needing general
information about the sun in relation to Earth. The user enters
the date and time and location in longitude and latitude. Soon
the time of sunrise and sunset (in both local and Grenich
Meantime), the angle of azmith, the declination of the sun and
the equation of time are displayed to the screen. Since the
program is written in uncompiled BASIC, you must have a copy of
BASICA yourself. But, at the same time, you may also peek at the
source code to see how this program was put together. This
program requires the most minimum in both hardware and software
to operate.
Program name: Solar
Author name: Michael A. Syczylo
Address: NONE
Telephone Number: NONE
Suggested Donation:NONE
Program Description:
This program closely parallels the previously described program,
Sunset. According to the BASIC source code, this program is the
result of a sixth grade science project. Since the results ob-
tained were close to those of the previously described program, I
would suspect that it is somewhat accurate and I would venture
that the source code is available through a number of sources.
The main difference between this program and that of Sunset is
that this program only computes the output for time zones in the
North American continent. Minimum configurations and BASICA
needed.
Program name: Optics
Author name: NONE
Address: NONE
Telephone Number: NONE
Suggested Donation: NONE
Program Description:
Although an apparently sophisticated piece of software which
probably deserves merit in the area of mathematical calculations,
I cannot think of many uses for Optics. It declares on the open-
ing screen that it computes various parameters for reflecting
telescopes. I was hard pressed to find the input which would
lead to the secondary screen, which had calculated such things as
P.F. scale, Magnitude limit, Dawes limit, effective F-stop and
power and when I did, I was prompted for further information
(aperture, Mirror Field Length and Eyepiece F.L.). The final
output was a chart of field of vision and astigma. If you're
into telescopes or cameras to that degree maybe it will be of
use. The pascal source code is provided along with the compiled
code and absolutely no documentation.
Program name: Storm (V2.0)
Author name: WHMC (modified by Thomas Pesek)
Address: Sugarland TX
Telephone Number: NONE
Suggested Donation: NONE
Program Description:
If meteorology is of great interest to you, or you may be in-
clined to write a graduate thesis regarding hurricane patterns in
the southeast, then this is definitely the program for you. This
program accepts data input from the user in the form of specific
storm statistics and plots the movement of the hurricane on a
nice map of the Caribbean and the southeast of North America. If
you enter one of the key cities, and the storm comes too close
then a warning is issued also. Along with this program comes
several data files of hurricanes of the recent past, all with
their official names. To get a good idea of what this program
does, I found it useful to load one of these data files and dis-
play the data and the output. This program requires a minimum of
128K RAM and ideally a color graphics setup. It will work with
the monochrome system, but doesn't look nearly as nice.