As a big fan of both the Moon and ciechanow.ski this article is right up my alley.
During the 2024 solar eclipse I was explaining to people how an eclipse must occur during a new moon, and this article would have really helped. The discussion also made me realize how little most people spend thinking about the solar system and the relationship between the moon, sun, and earth. These things fascinate me (I think it's just the sheer scale of it all), and I hope to be able to get more people interested as well. The solar eclipse was great for that!
People are impressed if you can name the current moon phase and tell them what it'll be next. But it only takes a mental model of where the sun, earth, and moon orbits are relative to each other. I also find people are intrigued by the concept of earthshine, and often haven't noticed it until you point it out.
And once you internalize this, every image where there are moons pasted into the sky without understanding this will trigger you. It's like bad kerning. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
For a waxing moon the circular arc is on the right hand side and for a waning moon the circular arc is on the left hand side [Here in the Northern Hemisphere].
It would have been nice if the mnemonics Decreasing & Cresting worked but they don't. I personally use Developing & Collapsing to refer, respectively, to the waxing and waning moon. Has anyone a better couple of words than these?
In French we have "premier quartier" and "dernier quartier" for "first quarter" and "last quarter" respectively. The mnemonics work with lower case letters: p and d.
In English, the "d" for "decreasing" also works in lowercase, I guess that you can use "p" for "progressing".
The really satisfying thing for me was when I was on a sailing course and was instructed in how the moon causes the tides, and how the phase of the moon corresponds to springs and neaps.
Thinking about how the Moon, a body over 380,000 kilometers away, can perfectly block the Sun (something 400 times larger than itself) because of their relative distances is just mind-blowing for me
The Moon also plays currently a very special role in my life and my work days are dictated to a large extent by the current Moon phase :)
It's not discussed in the article but we have detailed models (ROLO[0] and LIME[1]) for how much light is reflected from the Moon and can be captured by a telescope. Like this one can radiometrically calibrate a telescope, that is, find a mapping between the digital numbers coming out from the sensor and actual radiance values.
At my current employer, Kuva Space, I'm among other things responsible for the commisioning and in orbit calibration of the payload. The Moon is a major calibration target for us, and between waxing and waining crescents I spent a lot of time analyzing Moon shots to perform radiometric calibration and camera parameter optimizations. The Moon doesn't know about weekends and images are not always downlinked at the most convenient times so that makes my life a bit more hectic.
My wife is a social worker at the county welfare office and swears there is a strong correlation between phase of the moon and the nature of her work with the homeless. To the point where where she checks the calendar to schedule more time for crisis handling around the time of the full moon.
Is there a name for this category of website? I am seeing content like this — elaborate, animated, interactive — more often here and I wonder if its part of a new corner of the internet I am not familiar with. Looks dope.
I've seen these called "explorables" or "explorable explanations" before and I really like them. I've been collecting notes on them here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/explorables/
Thank you for collecting and sharing these. I was so impressed by the submission that my first thought was to find some repository that contains the samples of a similar caliber.
This is a really nice collection. Thanks for putting them together. I'm very partial to this writing style as well.
I took a crack at making it slightly nicer to write this style of blog post via markdown with codeblocks you can mark to execute instead of display (and hot reload + gist rendering support)
It makes the source easy to read, even on GitHub preview, etc.
It's what I've been using to write my recent posts.
I consider Kerbal Space Program to be the most rewarding game I have ever played. Going into this page I was already somewhat familiar with many of the concepts it presented because I had encountered them during gameplay. However, having the ability to modify parameters was very helpful for visualizing different kinds of gravity assists. The game does not provide a way to do this, so it augments my understanding massively.
I agree that these interactive learning materials are incredibly promising towards actually understanding what is being presented. In other words, this is how I actually grok the concept.
I do think that explorables are useful in understanding, but man I feel overwhelmed with them. I feel like I do my t know when and where to stop. I feel less anxious with a plain PDF or similar. I guess it's a skill issue.
> I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this.
I've thought a lot about this – every time a new one is posted. I wish we could live in a world where this is what STEM education looks like. I think that, ultimately, it's just very high labor cost, and edtech is not known for being highly lucrative.
Bartosz does these as a labor of love, and the world is better off for it.
This is wonderful!!! Generalizing here but we really do take the moon for granted.
I bought a 'big ass telescope' a few years ago in an effort to bootstrap a hobby that I'd flirted with for decades but never really committed to. It's a Celestron 11" SCT and I really had no idea what I was getting into. When I think of space I think of things that are really small in the night sky, planets, galaxies, nebula...(turns out most of them aren't *that* small and I overshot the targets I had in mind)
I kept trying to photo galaxies and star clusters and all of these exotic things but had a bunch of trouble with tracking with long exposures. Out of frustration I ended up just pointing it at the boring ol' moon to at least get used to the equipment and workflows.
I fell in love with Luna.
The magnification of this scope really allowed me to explore the surface in a way I never had before. I got to know the 'map' and suddenly related to our celestial neighbor in a whole new way. It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - https://imgur.com/a/t9b1Uug
I since then improved my knowledge and technical skill but the month of the moon at the end of 2021 was really pretty spectacular for me.
I’m sure it’s different for everyone but I think it would just be the unbridled enthusiasm and love for the subject that they would show, the tidal dopamine surge of all the mysteries that have been unlocked, the validation of all the mysteries that remain. It would be amazing.
I have the same fantasy. I think it’s appealing because I imagine they’d be able to appreciate all the amazing things behind it more than most people, dead or alive.
Welcome to the hobby (even if a few years late). Pretty much everyone has the same experience as you. You buy the telescope, and then realize you need to buy a telescope for your telescope to use as a guide scope for accurate tracking for longer exposures.
However, those long exposures are much more likely to get photobombed by an airplane or satellite. So you're really better off taking shorter exposures with the highest ISO you can get away with, and then just stacking them.
I have a much wider scope that I can do 30s exposures unguided before trailing starts to become noticeable. If you can get away with 15s, you'd be amazed at what you can achieve with newer sensors.
Just some hints to help the disappointment at bay and maybe get you playing with the toys
Just search for local star parties in your area. Although, be willing to bend the definition of local depending on how light polluted your area is. My local is 4 hours away. Also, some colleges have viewing nights available. Even in light polluted areas, you can still see things for public viewings. They just suck for anyone wanting to image.
There are tons of sites listing them, but I doubt there's an absolute exhaustive list as it's all self-reporting to each of the sites. Your app idea would just be another in a list of places, sort of like the xkcd app about yet another standard.
Pretty much every telescope owner will happily show you the sky - after you've made an effort finding out where they gather, or if you just happen to walk by. The instagrammification of astronomy, with hordes of influencers rolling by without concern for the subject matter, just to insert themselves everywhere, is too horrible to consider.
It's not hard to find. Type "<city> astronomical society" into your search box. They have public websites, horribly outdated. Reach out to them, join the group, and you're more than welcome. But may there never be "an app for that"
Here in the EU you can look for "dark sky parks" which are basically parks or areas in nature designated for night sky viewing because of the low amount of light pollution and they are great spots to meet people, I'm pretty sure you have these in the US as well. I advise bringing a red light if you have to do some walking. Another recommendation would be to see if you have any actual observatories near you, some of them have events for the public every now and then. The people in this community are some of the friendliest I ever met and love sharing their interest and enthusiasm.
> just imagine if you could see all those galaxies and nebulae with your naked eye
I think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.
Oh boy if you're willing to spend money to look at the night sky - but feel like AR falls short currently - I highly recommend looking into NODs, something like a PVS-14, you might be able to pick one up second hand for the price of a new vision pro. Unfortunately photomultiplier are still quite expensive even if they are only gen2 :( some really cool tech though.
Definitely not arguing with you! Though I have a soft spot for analog tech in this area. I think AR might still have a very bright future, especially if you're learning about the night sky. I've spent many hours scanning the sky with an app I found that had an AR feature that allows you to point your camera at the sky and get an overlay on everything (including sattelites!).
It's called Star Walk 2 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vitotechno...
Just a FYI that if you choose to purchase the app you will still have to purchase the "all in one bundle" inside the app, I believe it's ~$5 and it gives you the sattelites, extended solar system, deep space objects and more. There's also a free ad supported version that offers the same base catalogue.
Night vision goggles have made immense improvements in recent years. Although the new technology in night vision is also very expensive. If they ever become accessible to the average consumer, they will change the world profoundly. Because you can walk during night as if it was day.
For astronomy, they probably won't make a difference, but it shouldn't be impossible to make goggle technology that converts astronomically interesting wavelengths to the visible spectrum.
It's not the wavelengths that are the problem but the exposure times; even with our best sensors we still need long exposures to capture compelling images of galaxies and nebulae. I don't think it will ever be possible in real time.
that's not a problem with displaying that information.
the post you replied to is not wanting to see like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation; in real time. they're (at least I think they are) wanting to visualize already captured information, such as x-ray and radio emissions overlaid a view of the night sky.
That’s incredible. Illustrates how incomprehensibly big galaxies really are. There’s a thing 2.5 million light years away which still appears 4x bigger than the Moon.
Very much incomprehensible, not only for outer celestial objects since we most probably will never fully discover our own physical earth planet or human body, let alone our thinking brain and our elusive consciousness.
Andromedia the closest galaxy to Milky Way (MW) is estimated to have one trillion stars while MW itself is estimated to have 250 billions. God really knows how many of them really exist and who's counting anyway? It's a blind faith at its worst to pretend we know the numbers since it's most likely that the earth and its sun bound astronomers (including the farthest distance ever Voyager spacecraft) are several orders of magnitudes off the marks.
It's also estimated that's more than a trillion number of stars inside the two galaxies (Andromeda and MW), not number of planets, not even the number of moons (the very title of this HN post).
Overall it's also estimated that there's more than a trillion number of galaxies (not stars) inside our universe.
To make matter even more complicated, all of these celestial objects are moving in very high speed relative to each others and none is static. These galaxy are millions or billions light years away from earth and by the time their EM signals has reached earth, they probably have already dissappeared or morphed into something else.
How about non observable part of the universe?
How about other parallel universes that physicists claim to exist?
My personal conclusion to this mind boggling facts is that to assume and conclude there is only earth that has living creatures is very much premature and naive.
Similarly, I came to learn some selenography writing a "voxel" (well, ray-casting) web game ... where you shuttle about the moon from crater base to crater base.
I became kind of fascinated with the craters, names of the craters (and history of those names), the "dark-side" and all the wild topology there. (Although I think I have tiles for the entire Moon, you don't have the fuel to get there.
I really like that one, so sad that the framerate tanks after one or two flights. Tried all the settings on the debug menu but only reload helps as you stated in the documentation. Happens both in firefox, firefox developer without plugins and in chrome.
I remember playing another moon lander 35 years ago in school on the swedish computers "Compis". Was a very basic version but I still loved it, it's something with slow heavy objects where you need to plan ahead what, when and how much you need to do.
An SCT11 should have no problem making out the rings of Saturn and maybe a band or two. But it's not a good beginner scope. Long focal lengths are hard to manage if you don't know what you're doing
Just to clarify is that the detail you can make out with the naked eye or a digital censor? If you meant digital censor, how much of a difference with the naked eye would you say it is? I've had this telescope on my list for some time but am not sure if my expectations are realistic.
Yeah, naked eye, although with a 6” telescope, I’d expect it to be a bit fainter - certainly that is the case through my 9.25” scope. I can often see a band in its rings.
It also depends a lot on atmospherics, if there is a lot of turbulence in the atmosphere it makes things less crisp (well, “dancey”, like looking through a heat haze.)
Look up your local astronomy group and go along one night, and see for yourself before buying anything. Saturn isn’t great at the moment (assuming London-ish latitudes) but Jupiter is around all night and you should be able to see it through a variety of scopes and eyepieces if you went along to a sky party.
Honestly, the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope I nearly cried. Truly amazing.
I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.
The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.
The shadows are very much my favorite part of this kind of shot. It provides so much visual texture to the surface, showing not only how rough it is but how smooth it is. the 'scar' to the bottom right (aka Alpine Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallis_Alpes) is always one of my favorites.
For people thinking of getting into moon gazing try binoculars first!
Laying down on your back, plopping a nice pair on your eyes and just looking at the moon is a fantastic experience. Aside from much better UX, binoculars also have depth-perception which makes the visuals all that more engaging.
If you have really nice clear sky in your area you can easily do that with stars and some planets as well.
This blew my mind a few years ago when I got some decent binoculars. Depending on their positions you can see all four of the Galilean moons - even from a vantage point in a major city.
I saw them entirely accidentally. I was looking at the moon through bins and checked out The Other Bright Thing nearby and was shocked to see what looks like little dots next to the big one. As Galileo himself would have done, I immediately went on the internet and consulted a sky chart, which confirmed that I was seeing the moons of Jupiter.
I still occasionally drag my friends out to look at the moons on a clear night. It's my favorite bit of practical astronomy to share.
I was able to take pictures of them with a DSLR with a decent zoom lens! I used Stellarium to check the positions, waited for a very clear night, and was able to get a very nice photograph of that and of the Pleiades.
This is great advice! It's really amazing how much more you can see with a regular decent pair of binoculars. I treasure the memory of being able to see some of the star clusters that I could only vaguely make out with the naked eye for the first time, now I basically bring them every night walk :).
I think the problem is that I would like to have an image stabilized version of that. Even small ticks of you fingers amplify quickly into shaky images.
I think instead of an eyepiece (or in addition to one) most consumer telescopes should include a usb image sensor that can screw into where the eyepiece is.
A lot of binoculars have a mount for a tripod which I can definitely recommend trying out of you happen to have both, or at least consider if you are planning to pick up a new pair.
There are also image stabilized binoculars. I have an older Canon 10x30 that I absolutely love (enough to tolerate the plasticizer now breaking down on the rubberized exterior)
Depth perception? I would think objects as far away as the moon shouldn’t produce a meaningful difference between the left and right eye. But that does tell your brain they are far away, so perhaps that’s what you mean.
It's not really depth perception, but there is a significant difference in how objects are perceived when looking with both eyes. It's also applicable to binocular splitters used with a single mirror/lens telescope.
Your brain can also do 1+1 and end up with 2.5 or even 3 in the brain :) I have really bad eye sight on both eyes, one can not see enough alone but both together see much better than I would expect on the same distance.
I was a kid living in Botswana when Halley passed earth.
We watched it every night through binoculars.
Marvelous clean air - humidity around 0%, just some dust. No light pollution (there wasn't an electricity grid in some 100km around, just a handful of small diesel aggregates).
The binoculars were more than enough to see the comet, its tail. And even get a feeling of the tail arcing in three dimensions.
The most important is that they capture enough light, for which the lenses must have a large diameter. 50mm is typical. Magnification around 10x is good. This is referred to as 10x50. I have a Celestron Skymaster 15x70 myself, which is specifically for night sky observation. The 70mm is very good, but the weight and the magnification make it difficult to hold still without a tripod, though you can still use it without, e.g. lying on your back
Try a good monopod. They're significantly more portable and give just enough stability in most cases to give good views whille allowing less restricted movement than most tripods.
I have a set of Vortex Diamondback HD 10x50s that are pretty affordable and do a good job with the moon (and hunting near dawn and dusk). The optics are definitely better than I expected for the price.
I have the Cannon 10x30 IS from a long time ago and they are the best binoculars I’d ever tried. I’m pretty shaky so the image stabilizing is game changing. I’m sure the more powerful pairs are incredible and in that case image stabilization is a must. https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/lenses/binoculars
Inconsistent style. Once global functions (that's so 2000), once prototypes (that's so 2010). No lazy loading, no modularization, no state management. Mixing variable declarations with initializations, one "var" declaration in the code. He probably haven't heard about TypeScript, transpilation, and doesn't understand static typing. Fells like a show off. That guy is an absolute no-no.
Was going to ignore this comment until the last 2 sentences. I rarely come across sites / articles that do this good of a job at explaining something I think calling it a "show off" and saying the author is an "absolute no-no" is a bit rude and I don't agree with it either. If anything I appreciate the code as it is, it's very readable at least to me.
My comment was /s of course. JavaScript from 2000-2010 era can do wonders especially if you leverage modern APIs and enormous performance of modern browsers, instead of silting it up with transpilation, frameworks, and layers of modules. Unfortunately simplicity is signalling a beginner and amateur in enterprise working environment.
You definitely don't need a CMS for a blog. I'd expect most HNer blogs you see here are either html files or markdown processed/styled into html files. I bet various templating solutions are popular too, which just output html files.
The very first interactive element is a great example of why ciechanow.ski is so great. Similar animations from other sources would probably limit to 28 frames and fake the image (using a simple mask). On ciechanow.ski there are hundreds(?) of frames and uses a bump map(?) to show accurate crater shadows on the moon's surface.
It goes way further than simple bump mapping. In terms of texture, there is a color texture and a height map, and the final rendering use real-time physically based rendering (PBR) techniques that takes into account the properties of the lunar regolith, as explained near the end of the article.
Color space is taken proper care of, and for images as rendered from the Earth point of view, there is a model of the atmosphere, so that the sky looks blue during the day and the Moon looks red at the horizon.
There are no pre-calculated images and only 3 photos. All the shading is done in real time using realistic models.
years back i came across this moon-related modeling problem on stackoverflow (i'm not the original poster)[0] and it's stuck with me that this seems like something that should have an easy solution.
An HN thread about how cool the moon is seems like a good place to resurface it.
But the question is this:
The crescent of the moon face is tilted based and the angle of that tile depends on the viewer's latitude on earth. Is there an equation that maps viewer latitude to the tilt of the moon crescent?
One thing I've noticed while looking at the Moon, the "dark" part is lit enough to see that it's an orb and not really being eaten by darkness. This webpage doesn't do that, I guess it's from a different perspective without the earth shining on the Moon.
Think of how when the moon is in the sky at night the ground on Earth is lit up and not fully black. Same with the moon, it’s not totally dark on the night side of the moon if the Earth is in the sky from the moon’s perspective.
I haven’t read the article but Bartosz articles are so good and enjoyable to read that I get excited whenever I see a new one pop up. I have already set some time aside tonight to read it with care.
Bartosz if you are reading this: thank you so much for these articles. You truly are an inspiration and I can only hope one day I get to be as good a communicator as you are.
On an unrelated note, on the Sunday we had a major lunar standstill i.e. the full Moon at its highest orbit (as seen from northern hemisphere). It happens every 18.5 years.
I can't tell you how excited I get everyone time he does a new one of these. They have all the delight and wonder of a child's pop-up book, but with the depth of a college text book. Consistently one of the best things on the internet.
On January 6, 2023, at approximately noon, I happened to take a flight from Svolvær, Norway to Bodø, Norway, which, took me from 21.8 degrees latitude to 22.8 degrees latitude, which took me from [just inside polar night] to [just inside daytime].
I saw the moon at takeoff and the sun at landing.
It was an absolutely miraculous, specatular coincidence -- the latitudes I was flying over, the time, the date, the moon phase, the flight path.
This flight allowed me to have a full 3D view of space -- the moon, the Earth, the sun, all within an hour.
It was the first time I felt that the moon and sun weren't just discs flying around the sky randomly, but rather that I was the one flying through space, had a 3D sense of where the moon was behind me and where the sun was peeking ahead of me, and that the Earth felt curved as I moved out of the view of the moon and into the view of the sun.
The moon is so interesting, easy to forget how much it affects life on Earth because we see it all the time.
Like others in the thread, I have a telescope and it's a wonderful experience pointing it skyward while it's still light out and the moon is visible. Then I can really see all the craters and "pock marks" on the surface. (My telescope isn't good enough to be able to see anything during a full moon, it all just becomes washed out.)
What an amazing exploration, from watching the sun set over moon craters in the first graphic to the simulation of how the Moon formed and the lucid explanations of tidal locking and axial precession.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadDuring the 2024 solar eclipse I was explaining to people how an eclipse must occur during a new moon, and this article would have really helped. The discussion also made me realize how little most people spend thinking about the solar system and the relationship between the moon, sun, and earth. These things fascinate me (I think it's just the sheer scale of it all), and I hope to be able to get more people interested as well. The solar eclipse was great for that!
I'm speechless
In English, the "d" for "decreasing" also works in lowercase, I guess that you can use "p" for "progressing".
Hey, that's the first the time I realized this.
Also full moon rises the highest in winter, contrary to the sun - when it’s at it’s lowest[1].
Funny things happen at the poles where sun is above/below horizon for half a year: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/27750
[1] the further from equator you are the more pronounced it is.
It's not discussed in the article but we have detailed models (ROLO[0] and LIME[1]) for how much light is reflected from the Moon and can be captured by a telescope. Like this one can radiometrically calibrate a telescope, that is, find a mapping between the digital numbers coming out from the sensor and actual radiance values.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/media/files/rolo-lunar-model-and-databa... [1] https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/24/3649/2024/
Could you explain further?
Well written, decently comprehensive interactive documents.
I think such formats should be prioritised instead of textbooks for creating learning materials.
I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this. Brilliant comes close, but its not at this level.
Everyone in Edtech seems to be running towards AI gimmicks.
Thank you Ciechanowski!
Here's the website that coined the term: https://explorabl.es/
I took a crack at making it slightly nicer to write this style of blog post via markdown with codeblocks you can mark to execute instead of display (and hot reload + gist rendering support)
It makes the source easy to read, even on GitHub preview, etc.
It's what I've been using to write my recent posts.
https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/mdxish
But at the end of the day, content itself and the code that powers it is more important than any framework you might use.
That observable system you made here sure renders beautifully.
I agree that these interactive learning materials are incredibly promising towards actually understanding what is being presented. In other words, this is how I actually grok the concept.
That said, Ciechanowski is on another level entirely.
[1] https://brilliant.org/
I've thought a lot about this – every time a new one is posted. I wish we could live in a world where this is what STEM education looks like. I think that, ultimately, it's just very high labor cost, and edtech is not known for being highly lucrative.
Bartosz does these as a labor of love, and the world is better off for it.
I bought a 'big ass telescope' a few years ago in an effort to bootstrap a hobby that I'd flirted with for decades but never really committed to. It's a Celestron 11" SCT and I really had no idea what I was getting into. When I think of space I think of things that are really small in the night sky, planets, galaxies, nebula...(turns out most of them aren't *that* small and I overshot the targets I had in mind)
I kept trying to photo galaxies and star clusters and all of these exotic things but had a bunch of trouble with tracking with long exposures. Out of frustration I ended up just pointing it at the boring ol' moon to at least get used to the equipment and workflows.
I fell in love with Luna.
The magnification of this scope really allowed me to explore the surface in a way I never had before. I got to know the 'map' and suddenly related to our celestial neighbor in a whole new way. It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - https://imgur.com/a/t9b1Uug
I since then improved my knowledge and technical skill but the month of the moon at the end of 2021 was really pretty spectacular for me.
"Wow so many lights" is the first answer I can think about right away
I also bought a Seestar S50 last year and have been having an absolute blast with it. Feels like a renaissance in astronomy is upon us.
However, those long exposures are much more likely to get photobombed by an airplane or satellite. So you're really better off taking shorter exposures with the highest ISO you can get away with, and then just stacking them.
I have a much wider scope that I can do 30s exposures unguided before trailing starts to become noticeable. If you can get away with 15s, you'd be amazed at what you can achieve with newer sensors.
Just some hints to help the disappointment at bay and maybe get you playing with the toys
(startup/app idea!)
There are tons of sites listing them, but I doubt there's an absolute exhaustive list as it's all self-reporting to each of the sites. Your app idea would just be another in a list of places, sort of like the xkcd app about yet another standard.
https://www.go-astronomy.com/star-parties.htm
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/annual-starg...
Pretty much every telescope owner will happily show you the sky - after you've made an effort finding out where they gather, or if you just happen to walk by. The instagrammification of astronomy, with hordes of influencers rolling by without concern for the subject matter, just to insert themselves everywhere, is too horrible to consider.
It's not hard to find. Type "<city> astronomical society" into your search box. They have public websites, horribly outdated. Reach out to them, join the group, and you're more than welcome. But may there never be "an app for that"
I haven't realized Andromeda is 4x bigger than the Moon until I tried to take a picture of it
https://mikkolaine.blogspot.com/2014/01/size-of-deep-sky-obj... (not my picture)
I think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.
For astronomy, they probably won't make a difference, but it shouldn't be impossible to make goggle technology that converts astronomically interesting wavelengths to the visible spectrum.
the post you replied to is not wanting to see like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation; in real time. they're (at least I think they are) wanting to visualize already captured information, such as x-ray and radio emissions overlaid a view of the night sky.
Maybe I misunderstood this part then?
Andromedia the closest galaxy to Milky Way (MW) is estimated to have one trillion stars while MW itself is estimated to have 250 billions. God really knows how many of them really exist and who's counting anyway? It's a blind faith at its worst to pretend we know the numbers since it's most likely that the earth and its sun bound astronomers (including the farthest distance ever Voyager spacecraft) are several orders of magnitudes off the marks.
It's also estimated that's more than a trillion number of stars inside the two galaxies (Andromeda and MW), not number of planets, not even the number of moons (the very title of this HN post).
Overall it's also estimated that there's more than a trillion number of galaxies (not stars) inside our universe.
To make matter even more complicated, all of these celestial objects are moving in very high speed relative to each others and none is static. These galaxy are millions or billions light years away from earth and by the time their EM signals has reached earth, they probably have already dissappeared or morphed into something else.
How about non observable part of the universe?
How about other parallel universes that physicists claim to exist?
My personal conclusion to this mind boggling facts is that to assume and conclude there is only earth that has living creatures is very much premature and naive.
I became kind of fascinated with the craters, names of the craters (and history of those names), the "dark-side" and all the wild topology there. (Although I think I have tiles for the entire Moon, you don't have the fuel to get there.
https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Mooncraft2000
if y'all only care about the game: https://mooncraft2000.com/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1739314565?ref_=pe_3052080_3975148...
I remember playing another moon lander 35 years ago in school on the swedish computers "Compis". Was a very basic version but I still loved it, it's something with slow heavy objects where you need to plan ahead what, when and how much you need to do.
https://www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/pmlbne/jupiter_...
i'm sure with tracking and stacking it would be much more.
It also depends a lot on atmospherics, if there is a lot of turbulence in the atmosphere it makes things less crisp (well, “dancey”, like looking through a heat haze.)
Look up your local astronomy group and go along one night, and see for yourself before buying anything. Saturn isn’t great at the moment (assuming London-ish latitudes) but Jupiter is around all night and you should be able to see it through a variety of scopes and eyepieces if you went along to a sky party.
Honestly, the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope I nearly cried. Truly amazing.
I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.
The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.
Moon over Menlo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/24118398766/
Moon, Mars, Venus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/16598905865/
The shadows are very much my favorite part of this kind of shot. It provides so much visual texture to the surface, showing not only how rough it is but how smooth it is. the 'scar' to the bottom right (aka Alpine Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallis_Alpes) is always one of my favorites.
Thanks again!
Laying down on your back, plopping a nice pair on your eyes and just looking at the moon is a fantastic experience. Aside from much better UX, binoculars also have depth-perception which makes the visuals all that more engaging.
If you have really nice clear sky in your area you can easily do that with stars and some planets as well.
I still occasionally drag my friends out to look at the moons on a clear night. It's my favorite bit of practical astronomy to share.
I think instead of an eyepiece (or in addition to one) most consumer telescopes should include a usb image sensor that can screw into where the eyepiece is.
We watched it every night through binoculars.
Marvelous clean air - humidity around 0%, just some dust. No light pollution (there wasn't an electricity grid in some 100km around, just a handful of small diesel aggregates).
The binoculars were more than enough to see the comet, its tail. And even get a feeling of the tail arcing in three dimensions.
Awe-inspiring. Beautiful.
How does the author build these pages? Looks like it is React. The entire blog must be custom built, no? Or is this built on top of an existing CMS?
https://ciechanow.ski/js/base.js
https://ciechanow.ski/js/moon.js
Also nice that the author didn't minify it. Interesting to read through.
https://ciechanow.ski/js/moon.js
Color space is taken proper care of, and for images as rendered from the Earth point of view, there is a model of the atmosphere, so that the sky looks blue during the day and the Moon looks red at the horizon.
There are no pre-calculated images and only 3 photos. All the shading is done in real time using realistic models.
An HN thread about how cool the moon is seems like a good place to resurface it.
But the question is this:
The crescent of the moon face is tilted based and the angle of that tile depends on the viewer's latitude on earth. Is there an equation that maps viewer latitude to the tilt of the moon crescent?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22392045/calculating-moo...
Sometimes it's clearly visible, but often I agree that it's hard to tell if you're imagining it or not.
Bartosz if you are reading this: thank you so much for these articles. You truly are an inspiration and I can only hope one day I get to be as good a communicator as you are.
On January 6, 2023, at approximately noon, I happened to take a flight from Svolvær, Norway to Bodø, Norway, which, took me from 21.8 degrees latitude to 22.8 degrees latitude, which took me from [just inside polar night] to [just inside daytime].
I saw the moon at takeoff and the sun at landing.
It was an absolutely miraculous, specatular coincidence -- the latitudes I was flying over, the time, the date, the moon phase, the flight path.
This flight allowed me to have a full 3D view of space -- the moon, the Earth, the sun, all within an hour.
It was the first time I felt that the moon and sun weren't just discs flying around the sky randomly, but rather that I was the one flying through space, had a 3D sense of where the moon was behind me and where the sun was peeking ahead of me, and that the Earth felt curved as I moved out of the view of the moon and into the view of the sun.
My pictures and whiteboard illustration:
https://imgur.com/TYFAdoP
Like others in the thread, I have a telescope and it's a wonderful experience pointing it skyward while it's still light out and the moon is visible. Then I can really see all the craters and "pock marks" on the surface. (My telescope isn't good enough to be able to see anything during a full moon, it all just becomes washed out.)
As with many of the author’s posts, the underlying code can be an interesting read as well: https://ciechanow.ski/js/moon.js