Zenith: a live local-first fixed viewport planetarium(smorgasb.org) |
Zenith: a live local-first fixed viewport planetarium(smorgasb.org) |
I block location requests, so it's just showing me the default location as Stonehenge. It would be interesting to allow the user to manually add location coords.
shouldn't be hard. one difference is moving to a much higher/lower lat. to see the difference in angular speed. Where would you want to see?
You can do this with the naked eye in an area with tall sharp mountains such as the Alps, Rockies, Andes, etc. at times when the moon is low in the sky.
Move to a position where the moon is partially obscured by a mountain across the valley, and watch. It is surprisingly easy how little walking it can take to find a useful alignment. Then just stand and watch. The effect is amazing, even more powerful than watching it drift out of frame the telescope — it really shifts one's perspective to feeling how the earth moving.
But it is not nearly as vivid a sensation as the moon against a sharp edge of an alpine slope a couple km across a valley (vs all the way to the horizon).
The difference is on the scale of imagining being traveling in a railway car vs actually being in one. Once I saw it, it wasn't unlike being on a smooth Swiss rail just starting to pull out of the station...
I am struggling a bit with this explanation though:
> ZenithTrack shows a strip of the sky, a thin ribbon, one rice-grain tall, about 2,500 rice-grains long.
What does it mean to say "one rice-grain tall"? Is that angular diameter at arm's length?
was quicker to hardcode one, then add the feature
just as part of that hacker spirit, I tried changing the 32 to a different value in the url...:thinking-face:
again, admitted scope creep.
I just hate that browsers allow for location data to be used. Sure, there's some cool/fun things that can be done like what you've done, but it's too easy to abuse it. Adding features like this that allow the user to set it, especially if they wanted to see what it looks like from a different location, would be less invasive while adding more features. Just so you know, even if I open gMaps, it guesses my location based on IP because I damn sure don't share with theGoog.