Space Calculations

Anyone writing hard science fiction occasionally needs to do astronomical calculations. How long will it take a rocket to get from A to B? How big will this planet's star look from the surface? How long will the year be? How long will eclipses last?

These questions are both easy and hard. Easy, because they only require a few bits of information to state, but hard because they need a fair amount of math to solve. Plenty of web pages give the answers, but most of them assume a level of mathematical sophistication that most folks just don't have.

I propose to use JavaScript create a number of blog pages to make it easy to get answers to questions of this sort. As such, I don't expect to update it quite as often as my other blog, which is about my experiences reading in foreign languages.