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 pages (asteroids and comets) are frequently revised, so will not be listed here every time.
- 2013 May 10 - The table of asteroid appulses has been extended with widened search criteria, agreed with the Asteroid and Remote Planets Section.
- 2013 Mar 13 - The display of Saturn's satellites has been translated from Java to JavaScript (with server-side support) to make the start-up simpler. The user interaction has been modified to use our JavaScript Calendar object.
- 2013 Feb 25 - There is a new "morsel" about Julian Dates and how they are computed.
- 2013 Feb 25 - The Julian Date converter and the display of Jupiter's satellites have both been translated from Java to JavaScript to make their start-up simpler. The user interaction has been modified to use a new JavaScript Calendar object. It is planned to do the same for the applet showing Saturn's brightest satellites.
- 2012 Dec 9 - A star-hopping application can now be downloaded from the applets section, as mentioned in the introduction to Handbook 2013.
- 2012 Dec 1 - Pages which involve Java applets now use Oracle's recommended deployment script to ensure that the required version of the JRE (Java Run-time Environment) is installed on your system. This may take you automatically to www.java.com to get the JRE. This is a safe process. It does require JavaScript to be enabled in your browser, as expected by all web sites involving dynamic content.
- 2012 Aug 1 - The descriptive text for the "What's observable" applet has been revised, particularly to include references to further information about the Kreutz comet search area.
- 2012 Jul 31 - The "What's observable" applet now puts the full names of objects on the detailed charts. This was particularly requested for the charts of the Kreutz comet search area. Also the general list of comets (not necessarily Kreutz) which may be added to the display is now much larger.
- 2012 Jul 31 - Another ERRATUM for the 2012 Handbook has been found - see this page.
- 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.
