My name is Alberto Cavalli. I’m an Italian IT consultant and live in Rome, Italy. Astronomy and everything that is related with has always been a strong interest for me since childhood. I’ve been tickering with orbit calculations and astronomical event prediction for more than 40 years.
I think that in the 80’s I’ve programmed almost everything that was programmable (Texas T series, HP RPN and so on) until Personal Computers gave new chance in terms of memory and speed for astronomical computations.
Ok, they look kinda primitive today, but an IBM Pc XT or an Olivetti M20 weren’t really comparable with today’s machines in terms of graphics, memory and speed.
Therefore, after several years of programming inactivity I found on Internet a promising IDE, Lazarus, and met an old friend too, Pascal programming language. Lazarus’ catch-phrase is something like “Write Once, Compile Anywhere”, and it’s true. Even though some graphic control behaves differently in Windows or in MacOS, I can say that it’s true. So I started (October 2019) assembling my VSOP87/ELP2000-85 engine in Pascal and Kontacts slowly has come to life. Actually it is still coming to life because many features are not implemented yet (Phases of Planets, Satellites, Asteroids, Comets, etc) but the software useability is good though.
I want to clarify that UrukFSP is NOT a Planetarium. There are many good programs out there, just to mention my favorite ones, SkySafari or Stellarium that admirably do the job. UrukFSP is not focalized on the entire sky as it appears to the observer in a certain moment, but on a particular event that’s taking place now, 2000 years ago or in the future.
Administrator email : urukfsp.software[cut-this]@gmail.com
