A Minor Planet For You

Told with arresting candor, Leslie Greentree’s short fiction creates the satisfying sense of discovering someone’s long-kept secret, or the guilty pleasure of overhearing a scathing conversation. A housewife indulges in monthly purchases of specialty vinegar and savours her romantic fantasies about the local grocery store manager; a daughter catches glimpses of herself in the face of her mother’s suffocating attentions; a minor astronomer accumulates star charts and wasted nights rather than tender moments with his wife. A Minor Planet for You explores the often wry, sometimes dark but consistently fragile constellations of human relationships.

Told with arresting candor, Leslie Greentree’s short fiction creates the satisfying sense of discovering someone’s long-kept secret, or the guilty pleasure of overhearing a scathing conversation. A housewife indulges in monthly purchases of specialty vinegar and savours her romantic fantasies about the local grocery store manager; a daughter catches glimpses of herself in the face of her mother’s suffocating attentions; a minor astronomer accumulates star charts and wasted nights rather than tender moments with his wife. A Minor Planet for You explores the often wry, sometimes dark but consistently fragile constellations of human relationships.

Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, Fifth Edition, is the official reference for the field of the IAU, which serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and any surface features on them. The accelerating rate of the discovery of minor planets has not only made a new edition of this established compendium necessary but has also significantly altered its scope: this thoroughly revised edition concentrates on the approximately 10,000 minor planets that carry a name. It provides authoritative information about the basis for all names of minor planets. In addition to being of practical value for identification purposes, this collection provides a most interesting historical insight into the work of those astronomers who over two centuries vested their affinities in a rich and colorful variety of ingenious names, from heavenly goddesses to more prosaic constructions. The fifth edition serves as the primary reference, with plans for complementary booklets with newly named bodies to be issued every three years.

Why just get by in F# when you can program in style! This book goes beyond syntax and into design. It provides F# developers with best practices, guidance, and advice to write beautiful, maintainable, and correct code. Stylish F# covers every design decision that a developer makes in constructing F# programs, helping you make the most educated and valuable design choices at every stage of code development. You will learn about the design of types and function signatures, the benefits of immutability, and the uses of partial function application. You will understand best practices for writing APIs to be used by F#, C#, and other languages. Each carefully vetted design choice is supported with compelling examples, illustrations, and rationales. What You'll Learn Know why, when, and how to code in immutable styleUse collection functions, piping, and function composition to build working software quicklyBe aware of the techniques available to bring error handling into the mainstream of program logic Optimize F# code for maximum performance Identify and implement opportunities to use function injection to improve program design Appreciate the methods available to handle unknown data values Understand asynchronous and parallel programming in F#, and how it differs from C# asynchronous programming Who This Book Is For Any developer who writes F# code and wants to write it better

The quantity of numbered minor planets has now well exceeded a quarter million. The new sixth edition of the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, which is the IAU’s official reference work for the field, now covers more than 17,000 named minor planets. In addition to being of practical value for identification purposes, the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names provides authoritative information on the basis of the rich and colorful variety of ingenious names, from heavenly goddesses to artists, from scientists to Nobel laureates, from historical or political figures to ordinary women and men, from mountains to buildings, as well as a variety of compound terms and curiosities. This sixth edition of the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names has grown by more than 7,000 entries compared to the fifth edition and by more than 2,000 compared to the fifth edition, including its two addenda published in 2006 and 2009. In addition, there are many corrections, revisions and updates to the entries published in earlier editions. This work is an abundant source of information for anyone interested in minor planets and who enjoys reading about the people and things minor planets commemorate.

How can you find new minor planets, comets and novae? How can you use photoelectric detectors to derive the temperatures of stars? And how can you predict future eclipses and occultations of stars by minor planets? The questions asked by serious amateur astronomers are answered in this authoritative and wide-ranging guide. For each topic, sound practical methods of observation and the scientific background are given to lead you to better observations. Guidelines also show you how to record and catalogue your observations using the recognised professional terminology and classification schemes. From the simplest pencil drawings of the moon to observations of the most distant galaxies with state-of-the-art CCD cameras and photoelectric photometers, this guide is packed with practical tips for all types of amateur observations. It will develop the observational skills of the keen novice and satisfy the more demanding needs of the experienced amateur astronomer.

A playful, intoxicating debut by a young poet dedicated to expanding the boundaries of lyric poetry

This book relates the history of asteroid discoveries and christenings, from those of the early pioneering giants of Hersehel and Piazzi to modern-day amateurs. Moving from history and anecdotal information to science, the book's structure is provided by the names of the asteroids, including one named after the author. Free from a need to conform to scientific naming conventions, the names evidence hero-worship, sycophancy, avarice, vanity, whimsy, erudition and wit, revealing the human side of astronomers, especially where controversy has followed the christening. Murdin draws from extensive historical records to explore the debate over these names. Each age reveals its own biases and preferences in the naming process. “/p> Originally regarded as “vermin of the skies,” asteroids are minor planets, rocky scraps left over from the formation of the larger planets, or broken fragments of worlds that have collided. Their scientific classification as “minor” planets makes them seem unimportant, but over the past decades asteroids have been acknowledged to be key players in the Solar System. This view of their starring role even alters the trajectories of spacecraft: NASA’s policy for new space missions en route to the outer planets is that they must divert to study passing asteroids whenever possible. This book provides for readers a complete tour of the fascinating world of asteroids.