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
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ok so back to the moon thing, i found another resource and i think i understand the why behind the asinine coordinate systems a little better but it also glosses over the math so it's kinda useless at the same time. i'm tempted to just make shit up and move on, but it would bother me that the function was wrong if i did that
@aeva i believe all our physical models diverge from reality on a long enough timescale. even quantum mechanics. every model is lossy compression / fitting of reality that we extrapolate from, starting at the time that the underlying measurements were taken.
best thing i can think of is measure exact position of celestial bodies, then run a sufficiently detailed n-body sim with best guesses for all state we can not measure, starting at that point. and then restart every year.
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@aeva is this one of those things where the approximate solution that drifts from reality by 0.0004% every year is like 3 lines and the more correct one is 5 pages of dense research and no one who writes about it is concerned with the idea that a reader may be a beginner and not know the difference
@halcy there's no closed form solution at all and from what i can tell the good solutions need to be rejiggered every few decades to stay accurate
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@halcy there's no closed form solution at all and from what i can tell the good solutions need to be rejiggered every few decades to stay accurate
@halcy the real problem here is that academic astronomy best practice is to tie everything into spherical coordinates on the firmament so they can factor out the earth enough that you can pretend it is a fixed vantage point that doesn't spin, and if god forbid you do need to tie an observation to geographic coordinates for some reason i guess you just burn an undergrad on it and not sully yourself with the indignity
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@halcy the real problem here is that academic astronomy best practice is to tie everything into spherical coordinates on the firmament so they can factor out the earth enough that you can pretend it is a fixed vantage point that doesn't spin, and if god forbid you do need to tie an observation to geographic coordinates for some reason i guess you just burn an undergrad on it and not sully yourself with the indignity
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@halcy the real problem here is that academic astronomy best practice is to tie everything into spherical coordinates on the firmament so they can factor out the earth enough that you can pretend it is a fixed vantage point that doesn't spin, and if god forbid you do need to tie an observation to geographic coordinates for some reason i guess you just burn an undergrad on it and not sully yourself with the indignity
@halcy i've got a feeling that this is what a self taught programmer feels when they try to work out how to sort stuff faster and everything they find is either programmers telling eachother to just use a library or academic formalist nonsense
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@halcy the real problem here is that academic astronomy best practice is to tie everything into spherical coordinates on the firmament so they can factor out the earth enough that you can pretend it is a fixed vantage point that doesn't spin, and if god forbid you do need to tie an observation to geographic coordinates for some reason i guess you just burn an undergrad on it and not sully yourself with the indignity
@aeva i guess that feels to me like it makes sense historically but maybe not…. anymore?
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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?
@aeva geographic lat long is relative to the an ellipsoid. 0 degrees longitude is fixed to the surface of the earth.
Equatorial is a sphere and the longitude equivalent doesn’t rotate with the earth.
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@aeva geographic lat long is relative to the an ellipsoid. 0 degrees longitude is fixed to the surface of the earth.
Equatorial is a sphere and the longitude equivalent doesn’t rotate with the earth.
@jkaniarz where I currently am stuck is how do you convert between the three when it is not the vernal equinox
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@aeva i guess that feels to me like it makes sense historically but maybe not…. anymore?
@halcy well, historically astronomy was among other things at times significantly concerned with answering the question "where the hell am I", whereas modern astronomy seems to be more split between "what is that specific bright object" and "visible spectrum is cringe"
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ok so back to the moon thing, i found another resource and i think i understand the why behind the asinine coordinate systems a little better but it also glosses over the math so it's kinda useless at the same time. i'm tempted to just make shit up and move on, but it would bother me that the function was wrong if i did that
@aeva i have copies of the explanatory supplement to the astronomical almanac in case i ever get enough of an urge to write astronomical software – both the 1960s edition and the more recent third edition that takes into account modern atomic time and general relativity and 🤯
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@aeva i have copies of the explanatory supplement to the astronomical almanac in case i ever get enough of an urge to write astronomical software – both the 1960s edition and the more recent third edition that takes into account modern atomic time and general relativity and 🤯
@fanf I just put in an order for the 2025 Astronomical Almanac - what is this about an explanatory supplement?
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ok so back to the moon thing, i found another resource and i think i understand the why behind the asinine coordinate systems a little better but it also glosses over the math so it's kinda useless at the same time. i'm tempted to just make shit up and move on, but it would bother me that the function was wrong if i did that
after a good night's sleep and reflecting on what I've learned so far, I've decided to follow the classic computer science strat: when faced with a problem you don't know how to solve, simply do something else, and pretend that is what you meant to do all along.
not only are horizontal coordinates the choice reference frame for backyard astronomers, the "altitude h" angular measurement is probably closer to the solution I wanted than my earlier framing of the problem. narf
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@jkaniarz where I currently am stuck is how do you convert between the three when it is not the vernal equinox
@aeva If you know the position at the previous equinox, I think it’s as simple as spinning the moon around the earth (in the plane of the moons orbit) for 2*PI*t/27.3 radians, then spinning the earth for 2*PI*t radians.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Google faces its first AI Overviews lawsuit from a major US publisher https://blog.quintarelli.it/2025/09/google-faces-its-first-ai-overviews-lawsuit-from-a-major-us-publisher/
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In cuffia
https://www.storytel.com/it/books/l-ultima-volta-che-siamo-stati-bambini-8760766
(Anche se ho sempre l'ansia di condividere cose commerciali da queste parti🤣🤣🤣)
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La destra USA sta pompando la propaganda dell'industria della carne e come previsto la campagna di Kennedy sui cibi ultraprocessati era funzionale ad un sostegno allo sfruttamento degli animali
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«Hanno convinto le persone che ci fosse qualcosa di sbagliato nei prodotti [di carne finta], che fossero ultraprocessati e cose del genere»
https://www.ilpost.it/2025/09/14/crisi-carne-finta/?homepagePosition=6
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@mohshbair
Ciao Mohammed, sono al tuo fianco e non ti abbandonerò.
Ti scriverò domattina per sapere come stai e come hai (e avete) passato la notte.
Che sia una buona notte per tutti voi e che tu possa sentirti meglio domattina.
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I miei gatti sono differenti: uno impazzisce per il pesto, l'altro per i pan di stelle.
