Astropro's Website Of the Week Award ©1998 by Richard Nolle

JUN 8, 1998 - NED Coordinate Calculator is one of those sites lots of us will never need. But when you DO need it, you'll thank your lucky stars you had the presence of mind to bookmark THIS site. (You have bookmarked it, haven't you?) NED Coordinate Calculator does celestial coordinate conversions for you, online and in real time. Key in Right Ascension and Declination plus the corresponding epoch date, and you can get the corresponding ecliptic coordinates in a flash. So who'd need such a thing? You might, the next time some astronomer announces the discovery of a new minor planet, a new comet, etc. Naturally, you'll want to know where to find that sucker in your chart. Alas, astronomers provide Right Ascension/Declination positions only. To transform those coordinates into ecliptic longitude (i.e. zodiacal position), you'll need a handy little aid exactly like the NED Coordinate Calculator - and now you have one. (Thanks to Jon Dunn for bringing this site to my attention through his post on alt.astrology!)

Actually there's more to the NED Coordinate Calculator than just converting Right Ascension and Declination to ecliptic longitude/latitude. Truth is, this handy little calculator converts all kinds of celestial coordinates. And there's a Help File too, if you need one. It's all courtesy of the good folks at NASA; or more specifically NASA, IPAC (the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center) and CalTech. They have plenty of other goodies online for you as well: check out the NED Home Page and see! (NED = NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database.)

Richard Nolle, Certified Professional Astrologer phone or fax 480-753-6261 - email rnolle@astropro.com Box 26599 - Tempe, AZ 85285-6599 - USA on the World Wide Web at http://www.astropro.com