Astronomy Programs/Freeware

Astronomy Software

There are commercial astronomical programs available, such as The_Sky and Red Shift, that are absolutely phenomenal and worth the cost, but enough about money. The scientific community is renowned for sharing information and resources among its members, and software is no exception. We have collected programs from the internet that we feel rival the commercial software, but cost nothing!

Astronomy Clock - Windows 3.x (34K)

Displays local, universal, or sidereal time for any location you enter. Handiest feature is that it continues to show time when minimized.

Astronomy Lab 2 - Windows 32s (615K)

A multitude of interactive reports, graphs, and movies that are determined by the variables you enter.

CyberSky - Windows 3.x (838K)

Quite possibly the greatest planetarium shareware available!

Sky Map 3.0 - Windows 95 (1.7M)

Just as excellent as CyberSky, although takes twice the time to download.

PKUnZip Utility - Windows (29K)

In order to uncompress .zip programs, type pkunzip -d filename.zip at the DOS command prompt.

Attention Mac users: We are extremely sorry, but neither of us use a Macintosh and we cannot in good faith provide software that has not personally been tested.

Perl Scripts

Click here for an interactive form that converts between Julian Day and the Calendar Date.

TI-82 Programs

Below are a couple of source codes for programs that can be used with a Texas Instruments TI-82 Graphing Calcualtor (and probably a TI-85). If you are even halfway familiar with the calculator the programs are self-explainatory. If you do have questions or find bugs, e-mail : astro@ncats.

calendar.txt - converts a Julian Day into the corresponding calendar date.

easter.txt - computes the date of Easter for any given year.

julian.txt - converts a calendar date into the corresponding Julian Day.

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