on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 02:28 AM GMT - 4372 Reads
Thomas Kraus, a German astro enthusiast keeps a rather original project of his own: freely downloadable spreadsheets for all conceivable astronomical purposes. Today, he released «Planetarium» - a full featured and revolutionary .xls which among other features draws sky charts...
A contribution of Dr. N. Gasch, sky simulation is just one of the skills of this surprising use for MS Excel (I bet you never imagined such an application could go this far).
More capabilities of this German language .xls include: a 3D solar system orrey; extended ephemerides tables for the planets and Moon (including a graph comparing it's apparent size etc...); a graph depicting the visibility of the planets along a 24 hour period; ephemerides for all the Messier objects; Sun ephemerides with graphs; Jovian system simulation graphs; graphical simulation of Saturn's rings and satellites; day and night progression over an Earth map and a lot of miscellaneous calculations, including on the telescope optical parameters and CCD sides.
Other MS Excel spreadsheets offered by the same author cover subjects such as: satellite tracking (with 2D and 3D graphics); comets; CCD and classical astrophotography; solar time calculations and many more.
Thomas Kraus, a German astro enthusiast keeps a rather original project of his own: freely downloadable spreadsheets for all conceivable astronomical purposes. Today, he released 
