The British Astronomical Association was formed in 1890 and membership is open to all persons interested in astronomy. It has an international reputation for the quality of its observational and scientific work.
The Computing Section began in 1920. Its work is nowadays largely concerned with the preparation of the annual Handbook of the British Astronomical Association, together with data for other publications.
On this site you will find, amongst other things,
- useful observing aids in the form of applets and scripts, calculating in real time, often with a detailed graphical display;
- finder charts for currently visible comets and asteroids;
- Handbook sections which hardly change from year to year;
- background information about the Handbook and its contributors;
- history of the Computing Section.
BAA members can download a PDF version of the Handbook from the Downloads option on the logged-in Members menu of the main BAA site.
What's new
You may need to clear your browser's cache to see latest changes (in Windows: Ctrl+F5).
The charts page is frequently revised, so will not be listed here every time.
- 2012 May 8 - A new applet showing an interactive view of the sky is aimed at making slides for educational presentations.
- 2012 Apr 30 - The catalogues page has been revised to give more information about finding catalogues online.
- 2012 Mar 21 - A small enhancement to the "What's observable" applet puts a marker at the edge of the display if an object is outside the +/-45 degree declination range, to make it more obvious that you can still click for its details. Eg, C/2009 P1 Garradd is currently at +66 degrees.
- 2012 Feb 27 - There is a new morsel, about avoiding errors with units when computing with angles.
- 2012 Jan 21 - Asteroid charts now cover all oppositions brighter than magnitude 12 up to 2012 Mar 15.
- 2011 Dec 28 - Comet charts for January added.
- 2011 Dec 24 - A new Errata section in the Handbooks page links to a corrected table of minima of RZ Cas for 2012.
- 2011 Dec 13 - Asteroid charts now cover all oppositions brighter than magnitude 12 up to 2012 Feb 29. The last entry is 433 Eros which will be only 0.18 AU from us at the beginning of February. It is well placed for UK observers now (Dec 13) at magnitude 10.1 in Leo Minor.
- 2011 Dec 1 - The charts page has been split into several sub-pages with a new page for comet charts.
