Astronomy Hacks by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson

tony hoffman wrote:

I see it just got Slashdotted:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl...&tid=160&tid=6


Link from that page:

http://moon.google.com/

Try zooming all the way in. ;^)

--
Pat O'Connell
[note munged EMail address]
Take nothing but pictures, Leave nothing but footprints,
Kill nothing but vandals...

Brian Tung wrote:

Zarkovic wrote:
What are these sort of 'hacks' in astronomy? I don't think I understand
fully Thank you.

Oh yes, I forgot about that. A hack, in this context, is a quick way to
do something. For example, a polar alignment hack on my C5+ is to set
the thing up so that it's roughly level, and have the handle point toward
the pole star. That's good enough for visual.


Thats not a Hack. That's a "Quickie"!



This is the origin, by the way, of the term "hacker" as it is applied to
computers. A hack is a quick, clever, and not necessarily inelegant way
to do a certain task--with the emphasis on clever. The task, contrary
to the popular sense of the word, need not be destructive in any way. I
might come up with a hack that uses sed and awk (two Unix programs) to
automatically insert MP3 tags into all of my audio files.

With the advent of nominal security in computer systems, it did take some
cleverness to break into them, and I suspect that, along with the sense
of hack, "to cut down," conspired to give the term its current negative
connotations. In any case, the book explicitly mentions the original
sense of "hack," and one of its objectives is to "reclaim" the term, as
the authors put it.

--
Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt

To answer your question I own the book and have read it carefully and I
find it to be excellent.Highly recommended I have posted to that effect
on amastro as a book they can recommend to intermediate amateurs, not
just to beginners. I find the Thompson's judgment to be very sound and
their explanations clear and detailed. For example, I liked their
explanation of the numbering and lettering systems used for stars. It
went one or two stages beyond what I usually read about that. And the
discussion of choice of grab and go telescopes was far better than most
of the others I have read. The Thompsons are pretty sharp cookies.

What interests me in the present thread. So few of the responses answer
your question. An immediate erudtie tangent into computer jargon. That
tells us something about whatg s.a.a. has becomne, I believe. (Sigh.)

I dd find it helpful to learn in this thread that all the Amazon
reviews were positive. I'll take a look at them and see what they have
to say.

Clear skies,
Bill Meyers

G.T. wrote:
Anybody take a look at this book yet?

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/astro.../colophon.html

The use of "hack" is only a continuum of an O'Reilly marketing gimmick
(See 'Google Hacks', etc.) It means more "tips" or "modifications" than
anything else.

Don't let the name scare you away. It's a great "cookbook" (another
gimmick) of ideas for amateur astronomy folks. I found it very useful.

-Bob