JAlma

Astronomy is a pretty modern science, or at least technology used to study it rapidly evolves. Celestial bodies are constantly studied, and have been for quite the time. However, personal interest, and hobbies can be sustained with applications like JAlma, providing a great deal of info on the solar system, and celestial bodies observation details.

A neat advantage is that you don’t have to go through a setup process to make the application work, allowing you to carry it around on a thumb drive to use on other computers besides your own. You just need to make sure that Java Runtime Environment is installed on the target PC.

The main window is initially empty, and there are several details you can fill in the space with. A good idea is to head over to the settings tab first, in order to configure the observer. Requirement fields require some knowledge and accuracy, with your input being related to place, longitude, latitude, and elevation. You can pick generator algorithm, which can either be DE405, or DE421.

Before retrieving results, there’s also the possibility to specify a date range to show details. A simple list of values can be obtained with the sky now function, which shows current position of all known planets, azimuth measured clockwise, phases of planets, apparent equatorial diameter, stellar magnitude, and angles between planets and the Sun or Moon in degrees.

There are more details which can be squeezed out of the application, such as general details for Sun ephemeris, Moon, planets, or comets. Internet connection is not required to retrieve results, because the application uses a common astronomical algorithm to calculate data based on known values, and movement info of naturally occurring astronomical objects.

Details can be a little difficult to comprehend at first, especially because of the plain text format, with different symbols and ASCII representation of tables, and values. However, the layout allows you to gather up all required details, since these are not discarded when a new set is triggered, with the possibility to export as text.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that JAlma is a lightweight, easy to use astronomical almanac, which can calculate the position of known celestial bodies, and events in a configurable time scale. Although data output can be a little rough since it’s in plain text format, it’s not that difficult to understand, and can be piled into a large file without losing any bits of info.