Introduction

I have always been passionate about astronomy. It has been years since I try to find a project that associates this passion with my love of coding.

I tried to scrap astronomical data from Heavens Above or Nasa, to retrieve ephemerides from SSD JPL Horizons or to compute Solar System bodies with Python libraries.

There are many things to be done to achieve my real goal which is to provide open APIs and libraries to easily compute and consume space data.

In the mean time, I recently realized that I spent a lot of time to understand science popularization, but I neglected mastering the basis and I spent too much time away from resources that explain how to compute this data oneself.

Introducing a new blog series

I recently discovered a wonderful book called Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus. This book provides a ton of methods and calculations around Solar System bodies such as the Moon phases, the planets' positions or even eclipses.

What I would like to do, is to dive into this book, try to understand it, adapt the calculations into a Ruby library, and explain on blog posts what I am learning and how things work.
I am not the first to adapt these calculations into libraries, you can easily find C++ or JavaScript adaptations. These adaptations will be useful to me when things will be complicated for my simple mind. But my main goal is to understand completely what I will be reading and to provide as much as possible information about the mind process around understanding mathematical algorithms and building code around them.

I will make approximations, probably some mistakes, I will not wait to have a fully implemented, tested, documented library before publishing it. I really want to code as I discover the formulas and learn new notions.

What next?

On the next episode, I will start with angles, their units and how to convert them.

Happy hacking!