About

Hello and welcome to my website! I started deepskies.com back in 1998 as a way for me to share my love of astronomy with the Internet. Over the years, the site has gone through many evolutions; from being a repository of my own telescope reviews, to being a news source of happenings in astronomy and at one point I envisioned a deep-sky image gallery. That is the theme that I've decided to return to with this latest edition of the website. It will focus on images of deep-sky objects, all presented in a common format in such a way that the size of the different objects can be directly compared. I'm excited to return to this project that I started back in 2013 (ten years ago!). I have also carried over some of my more frequently visited pages (ie: my DeepSkies Atlas, and the Meade LX Registry) and I've moved any other content over to my personal website: www.ricktowns.com.

Who is Rick Towns?

I am an amateur astronomer and professional computer programmer / systems analyst living in central Canada. I am married with three grown up children and a dog. My hobbies include astronomy (of course!), photography, mountain biking, computer programming, playing guitar, ham radio, hiking, and retro computing. My career highlights include working for Microsoft and NASA. If you want to get a hold of me, here's are some spots:

• Email: rick@deepskies.com
• Mastodon: astrodon.social/@rickt137

Now, here is "Hello, world!" in a bunch of different languages:

in C:

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return(0);
}

in Assembler (6502):

100D LDA #$48
100F JSR $FFD2
1012 LDA #$45
1014 JSR $FFD2
1017 LDA #$4C
1019 JSR $FFD2
101C LDA #$4C
101E JSR $FFD2
1021 LDA #$4F
1023 JSR $FFD2
1026 LDA #$2C
1028 JSR $FFD2
102B LDA #$57
102D JSR $FFD2
1030 LDA #$4F
1032 JSR $FFD2
1035 LDA #$52
1037 JSR $FFD2
103A LDA #$4C
103C JSR $FFD2
103F LDA #$44
1041 JSR $FFD2
1044 LDA #$21
1046 JSR $FFD2
1049 RTS

in C#:

using System;

public class HelloWorld
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");
    }
}

in C++:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::cout << "Hello, world!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

in Pascal:

program HelloWorld;

begin
    writeln('Hello, world!');
end.

in Perl:

print "Hello, world!\n"

in BASIC:

10 PRINT "Hello, world!"
20 END

in COBOL:

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID.     HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400*
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400     DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500     DISPLAY "Hello, world!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600     STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800     EXIT.

in FORTRAN:

program main
    implicit none
    write ( *, '(a)' ) '  Hello, world!'
    stop
    end

in Ada:

procedure Hello is
    begin
        Put_Line ("Hello, world!");
    end Hello;

in ColdFusion:

<cfset msg = "Hello, world!">
<cfoutput>#msg#</cfoutput>

or

<cfscript>
    WriteOutput("Hello, world!");
</cfscript>

in Java:

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}

in JavaScript:

alert("Hello, world!");

or

document.writeln("Hello, world!");

in PHP:

<?php echo "Hello, world!"; ?>