i nerd sniped myself tonight and i imagine the NSA operative who is assigned to me is very confused by the increasingly erratic and frustrated google searches for HOW DO I CALCULATE THE MOON WHERE IS THE MOON

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@halcy :3

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

in a way magpie math is kinda refreshing, like imagine not throwing everything away every few years because of industry fads

[conchoid@mastodon.gamedev.place]

This post is deleted!

[pupxel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva I think part of it is we stopped trying to guess based on date and moved to measurements and short term extrapolation

[c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io]

@aeva wait, is it your fault that we’re losing the moon in however many millions of years?

[squirrelbaffler@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva This is why we threw our hands up and said, just use what's already been done. We outsource "where are the space things" to NAIF SPICE: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/aboutspice.html (there's also the rust rewrite, ANISE, but we don't trust that at my place of work yet)

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@pupxel speak for yourself

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@c0dec0dec0de it might not be!

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@squirrelbaffler it occurred to me that this is one of those situations where one would probably normally use a library, but the problem is I need to prioritize speed over accuracy because it's repeatedly invoked in a real time audio thread, a use case which i'd not expect to be shared by serious scientific or industrial use cases

[cliftonr@wandering.shop]

@aeva

I warn you though, if I see the moon is broken tonight, I'll be complaining to you about it.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@CliftonR I will happily accept moon-related bug reports

[jon_valdes@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva at least now we have the J2000 epoch, which kiiiiinda hides away a bit of the old cruft... but yeah, it's pretty wild.

On the other hand, thanks to these whacky calendar conversions they can apparently use observations made by Chinese astronomers 2000 years ago, so hey, maybe they have a point

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@jon_valdes tbh i respect that modern astronomers decided this was fine and didn't go and add new problems to the pile

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

eee my copy of ｢The Astronomical Almanac 2025｣ arrived in the mail today while I was at work :D my hell spine hurts too much to be fussing with it tonight, but from flipping through it, it looks like it explains most of the information I've been missing and provides ample data to validate against <3

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I'm so excited I'm gonna figure out where the moon is :O

[rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva *points vaguely upwards*

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@rygorous too much light pollution :(

[rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva it's probably for the best. Being an astronomer, it's a young man's game. If I were to eat something like that now, I'd be in a food coma for the rest of the day

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@rygorous @aeva We wanted to render the moon in a night sky at Rec Room and I was horrified to discover that not only did they calculate the sun position and then just put the moon 180 degrees away, but despite this they also always render it as 1/4 full.

This was on my TODO list to fix, but...

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@TomF @rygorous now it will be wrong forever 😌