From The Foreword

Welcome, once again, to the crossroads where astronomy, mathematics, and arcane knowledge meet. In this third volume of his Morsels series, Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus deals masterfully with a host of new questions about eclipses and planetary conjunctions — things that anyone from a curious child to a serious skywatcher might wonder about. The sky’s rhythms are not strictly repetitive, as he proves time and again by finding entertaining quirks in the motions of the Moon and planets.

In his Preface the author hints that some readers might accuse him of practicing “old” astronomy. Don’t let that fool you. The problems he tackles would have fascinated astronomers of the early 20th and prior centuries, but those poor souls faced a brick wall of computational difficulty. They had to work out all their answers laboriously, with a pencil and paper. Freed from that limitation, the author uses today’s computers to address each topic with a rigor and finesse beyond the wildest dreams of any old-time practitioner.

After winning worldwide acclaim for his trailblazing Astronomical Formulae for Calculators (Willmann-Bell, 1982) and Astronomical Algorithms (1991), he has harnessed the powerful techniques presented in these works, along with other methods from his repertoire, for the novel applications covered here. For some really long-term studies he has collaborated with Aldo Vitagliano (University of Naples), the creator of Solex, a remarkable program for solar-system motions that can be freely downloaded from the Internet.