This is absolutely superb - just brilliant.<p>This is a personal reflection on the way it's presented. I'm sure that there are people who already know some of the content, and I found myself skimming over things, nodding, and thinking "Nothing new here." Then realised that there was something I missed, or an explanation that was especially nice, and I had to go back and re-read, wondering what else I might have missed.<p>So I found it all very smooth, clean, informative, but there was no story, no arc, no narrative, nothing to make me want to sit with a coffee (or other beverage of choice) and simply <i>read</i> like a novel. There wasn't the "Hook; Narrative; Reveal" structure that keeps the reader involved.<p>Which is a bit of a shame, because the bits I did take time over are really, <i>really</i> nice.<p>It's really nice.
What a beautiful, well designed and informative explanation of the complex earth / sun relationship. Well done!<p>One thing I would love to see is the path of the sun across the sky for different times of year, and different locations on earth.<p>Here in Seattle, the difference is fairly dramatic between winter and summer, and I've come to realize that the sun is never directly overhead, not even in summer. It would be interesting to see the difference between polar regions vs in the tropics also.
It's like I just read an epic story, still under impression ...<p>Quote: One day we’ll colonize other planets, those planets will have different suns, orbits, and rotations periods, yet a simple second will forever be tied to Earth and Sun.<p>I would definitely give my 'best web page 2019' to it. Bravo!
I remember spending a lot of time playing with a planets-and-gravity simulator on the Mac when i was a kid. I wrote a crappy clone of it as an applet for one of my first jobs!<p>This is the best web-based equivalent i found with a quick search:<p><a href="https://hermann.is/gravity/" rel="nofollow">https://hermann.is/gravity/</a><p>And this is a rather fine tutorial on writing your own:<p><a href="https://css-tricks.com/creating-your-own-gravity-and-space-simulator/" rel="nofollow">https://css-tricks.com/creating-your-own-gravity-and-space-s...</a>
I used it on an iPad.
For me, this was a beautiful example of how to leverage the strengths of a touchscreen to present information.
(too often, I find myself shaking my fist at how we’ve "bolted" a magazine onto a high-dpi display)<p>Wonderful stuff... thank you for making and sharing!
Very good made! I recently started astrophotography, it is a lot of fun. Just learning all those different stars and galaxies, it's incomprehensible how big is the space. Nice thing it's really doable to appreciate it live from your backyard. A lot of technical things are still desirable, a big opportunity for innovative ideas.
Very well made and very educational!<p>An often used algorithm for the calculation of the apparent sun position (given a date and latitude/longitude of the observer) is SPA of Reda et al. [1].
If you're interested, I wrote an Android app (Sun Locator [2]) that implemented this algorithm.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X0300450X?via%3Dihub" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.genewarrior.sunlocator.lite" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.genewarrio...</a>
Very nice visualization. It'd be interesting to see it extended to the galaxy, as in <a href="https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-earth-sun-and-solar-system-in-the-milky-way.888643/" rel="nofollow">https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/orientation-of-the-ear...</a>
> The Earth rotates around its axis from west to east, or, when seen from above, counter-clockwise.<p><i>North is not up.</i><p>When seen from above the South Pole, the Earth is rotating clockwise.<p>But really doesn't make much sense to talk about the rotation of a sphere by analogy to a 2D clockface. The Earth rotates from West to East; that's all that needed to be said here.
Last couple of months I started thinking about sidereal vs. solar year. The first one is determined by distant stars, the second one by our Sun.<p>The thing I'm thinking of is if small deviations accumulate over years, how night sky is changed at the same date across, let's say, 20 years?
This is excellent. I had been wanting to see something like this for a long time. It was difficult for me to imagine the orbit of earth around the sun, and nothing I found showed it well. Thanks for making this!