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]

today's extremely basic astronomy question that i'm finding surprisingly difficult to find an answer to: are geographic coordinates and equatorial coordinates the same coordinate system except one is for looking up and the other is for looking down, or is there some essential conversion step needed to correlate them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_coordinate_system

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

i feel like i'm so close to getting this working. i found a simple implementation of ELP2000-85 that gives the approximate ecliptic coordinates and distance of the moon for a given julian century, i found math for translating between ecliptic and equatorial coordinates, and the math for working with the julian calendar looks easy enough, so i just need to figure out the missing conversions and decide on an internal time keeping standard

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

i think astronomy would be a lot simpler if ancient peoples didn't get so hung up on conceptualizing celestial bodies as spheres and simply invented linear algebra first

[rf@mas.to]

@aeva On cosmology sequence breaks: Terence Tao noted that an ancient Greek heliocentrist got his arguments shot down because others said, hey, if the earth moves so much yet the stars seem to stay still, the universe would have to be *thousands* of times bigger than anyone figures it is. And how would you know, back then, it was way *more* than thousands of times bigger?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@aeva a lot of things would be simpler if cults based on "perfect" shapes hadn't done all the [gestures] that they did

divine geometry is a helluva drug

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@rf they were so close lol

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@aeva on the other hand getting extremely horny for triangles is both funny and kinda relatable, so

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@SnoopJ we're still using spherical trig in astronomy today despite earth being an ellipsoid

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@SnoopJ mood

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@aeva well, yea, because astronomy doesn't really give a shit what shape the earth is anyway

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@SnoopJ @aeva everything is a sphere if you zoom out far enough

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@glyph @SnoopJ i'm tired of all the spherical milky way conspiracy theorists

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@aeva @glyph this is a really easy "whoa dude" win when doing physics outreach, especially if it's coupled to the side of basically any demo about angular momentum, because then you get to talk about *why* galaxies mostly come in pancake form factor

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@aeva oh what a fun one

have you encountered the thing where every computation in astronomy is coordinate conversion

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@SnoopJ @glyph sure. it's just the hairy ball theorem taken to its logical extreme basically

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@ireneista yes

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@aeva "fun", isn't it

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

i just want to calculate my current ecliptic coordinates from my current geographic coordinates is that so wrong

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@ireneista no

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

i wonder to what extent astronomy is an insomnia friendly career still, or if it's mostly just diurnals looking at spreadsheets in fluorescent offices these days