DO NOT TRY TO USE EXCEL FOR ASTRONOMY

I did, the problem is that southerly declinations are written as minus
(degrees minutes and seconds). For between 0 and 1 degree south you
will need -00 degrees as a seperate value to +00 degrees. Excel
cannot do this, -0 is always converted to +0.

I found out with the locations of Globular clusters, I think it was
POL4 that is in the critical area.

Try Perl instead of EXCEL.

Dave Burton





On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 12:26:45 GMT, Odysseus
wrote:

In article ,
"OG" wrote:

"Matt" wrote in message
oups.com...

Now so far I've been inputting the RA and Dec's in the following format
into an Excel spreadsheet:

00 03 34.43

Does anyone know of anyway that I could somehow get Excel to insert
colons into the two spaces, or get it to recognise numbers written in
this format?

================

Personally I would insert 6 blank columns after the RA & Dec column, then
use Text to Columns to break the data into 4 of them as
RAHours, RAMinutes, DecDegrees and DecMinutes

Then to get the decimal values
RAHours + RAMinutes/60
DecDegrees + DecMinutes/60

Perform calculations using the last two columns.

I've used a similar approach as well, when I didn't want to bother with
string manipulations. Where I have both decimal and sexagesimal values
in a CVS file, before importing into Calc (which is very similar to
Excel -- this Mac is a largely Microsoft-free computer) I insert two
tabs after the former and separate the D (or H), M, & S of the latter
with tabs. That way the same formulae can be used for both types of
data, as the blank M & S fields will be treated as zeroes.