Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I saw the latest developments with the program of the College of Computer Science students doing their thesis on astronomy software. They showed me several animations that they did, and I gave my comments on them. I don’t think it’ll be enough to describe everything in one post, so I’ll just talk about a few of them today and save the rest for the next days.

First of all I saw the bowl of night depiction. It was actually just a wire frame of the horizon circle plus two curves that represent north-south and east-west, with labels. And it was shown from the outside. Sure, it looked three-dimensional and even turned like a dish in a microwave, but it did not emphasize the fact that the observer is supposed to imagine himself or herself under that dome. I usually accomplished this in class by drawing a little stick figure inside the bowl.

For their part, with all the graphic resources at their disposal, I would have expected a view of the celestial sphere from outside first, rotating on its own axis. Then show the Earth inside the sphere, and show a small man standing on the Earth. Afterwards, the lower half of the celestial sphere disappear to approximate what the observer sees, while still slowing rotating on its axis.

Or, they could show an actual bowl, show the inside to be dotted with stars, then overturn the bowl and enlarge it to encompass the entire sky.

Next were the comets and asteroids. The comet, unfortunately looked like a midget light saber instead of being parabolic. The view also turned around the comet from all angles, but it was only in the accompanying text that they said the comet’s tail starts to become visible when the chuck of rock and ice moves closer to the Sun, and that that the tail is always pointed away from the Sun.

For the asteroid, again they showed the “camera” angle zooming towards, passing by and around an asteroid, and their “where in the solar system” view only showed it outside the orbit of Mars, NOT between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That is, Jupiter wasn’t in their graphics.

The third one I actually liked. It was an illustrated explanation of why East and West are reversed in star maps. It shows a geographical map first, with the compass directions in the normal view. Then it zooms in and we see a guy lying on the ground with his arms behind his head. The view smoothly moves to beside the guy’s head as he looks up at the sky, and the compass “cross” above him now has east and west reversed, from his position.

Then there were the eclipses. The ones for the lunar eclipses I also liked, because the umbra and the penumbra of the Earth’s shadow were distinct in color: dark and light red respectively. This made very distinct visualizations between the total, partial and penumbral eclipses. Of course, these varieties did not have much difference when it came to looking at the lunar eclipse as seen from outside of the solar system, which only had one view.

For the solar eclipses, it was a bit trickier. The view from outside the Earth was good, as it even showed the shadow of the Moon passing along the surface of the Earth. But when viewed from the Earth, for one thing, the features of the Moon were still visible, which is not possible. Second, there was very little to distinguish the total solar eclipse from the annular solar eclipse because the annular eclipse did not have the thick orange ring visible instead of the corona.

I’ll get to the other parts they showed me next time.