Primer on celestial mechanics for the nervous

[sculptor]

A big ask.

My goal is to add positions of moon and planets to my self-written atlas and scope control program. I'm looking for suitable equations and algorithms. I find Jean Meeus' "Astronomical Algorithms" disorganized and hard to follow. His approach seems very old fashioned, requiring the blind manual entry of hundreds of coefficients into approximation equations that don't have much obvious connection to the physics. The book itself is written with the structure of a bowl of spaghetti. I guess I'm looking for a more 'modern' approach that's more comprehensible, closer to the physics, and where the computer does more of the work and I do less.

(Having said that, my background is medical devices, software and statistics - I'm comfortable with fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and multiple linear regression, not pure maths. Can manage 3D rotations and simple calculus, can invert a 2x2 matrix (after a Campari soda to steady the nerves), but Lagrangians and Hamiltonians are beyond me.)

Not looking to simply lift someone's c++ code that is itself unreadably dense and undocumented; rather to understand the equations.

All help greatly appreciated. Any recommendations, preferably something currently in print that I can get from Borders or Amazon?

[Karlsson]

Originally Posted by sculptor

Any recommendations, preferably something currently in print that I can get from Borders or Amazon?

Forest Ray Moulton: An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics. Dover Publications ISBN 0486646874
see http://store.doverpublications.com/0486646874.html

Dover also have some other titles on the same subject

[sculptor]

Many thanks. Have just placed order.