EDITORIAL INFORMATION

Ceres is a powerful application for calculating minor planets (MP) ephemerides and executing related tasks. Any astronomer, professional or amateur, can benefit by communicating with Ceres. Ceres will be of great service to you to store in its integrated database the elements of all numbered minor planets, as well as other their characteristics, allowing you to browse and to update the data; to calculate minor planets ephemerides -the tables of their positions for given set of moments- and represent them in different forms; to model visually the motion of several selected planets, the point of viewing, the scale and the speed being adjustable; to store the coordinates and names of observatories used at calculating topocentric MP positions; to visualize MP tracks on the selected sky area and to model MP motions against a stars background; and to get information on different astronomical notions.

(Extracted from the User's Guide).

OUR REVIEW

The program we are examining here is special for several reasons. Developed within the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg, Russia, its purpose is to use the money obtained with its sales in the financing of scientific activities developed in the institute, as its budget has drastically been reduced ever since the former Soviet Union disappeared.

This is not a program of great graphic displays but a unique system which will surely be very useful to amateur as well as professional observational astronomers, more particularly, to those devoted to minor bodies. The current version of Ceres is available in five high density disks, given the considerable space that the data bases with the tabulated information of all the catalogued bodies (20 parameters for each one of them) occupy. Therefore, it must be installed in the hard disk of any computer equipped with MS-DOS 3.0 or better, 640 K RAM, some 6,5 MB free in the hard disk and an EGA/VGA adapter. A mathematical coprocessor is also recommended, in which case the program will work five times faster. Installing it is very simple and direct.

Designed with a menu structure, Ceres can give us all the information in its catalogue, calculate the ephemerides (in different versions) of the object we want to observe, etc. So as to visualize the path of the minor bodies on a starry sky, it uses an inner star catalogue, yet the users can utilize their own more or less detailed catalogues. No doubt this is a practical and eminently useful device which is periodically updated as well.