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!
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/
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!
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.
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?
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...
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:
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
This is one of them, the seemingly-pure-coincidence of solar eclipses where the apparent size of the moon equals the apparent size of the sun.
Ratios in general would be handy, since they would not depend on difficult-to-calibrate units: The moon is ~1/6 times the mass of our Earth; the biggest planet Jupiter/#5 is 2.5x the mass of all the rest and 5.2x the distance from the sun compared to Earth/#3, etc.
The one for Moon is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/on-moon-118130286
I wonder if single word titles helps with SEO
https://www.google.com/search?q=Moon
right on front page #7 . good job
This made me happy.
But I do prefer metric units.
This cycle has been known to some humans for more than 3000 years, and appears to have helped structure architecture/layout at various American locations such as Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) 1000 years ago. It takes a minimum of 3 generations to establish the cycle, which indicates something about the level of social and scientific organization in these societies.
― Rumi
I'd love to spend my time working on such articles when I'm retired :)
In the 2nd graphic, they use of location to display the tiny person on the globe chef's kiss. The attention to details is brilliant. I am 40% through with the post and I couldn't contain my excitement to post here. This is lovely.
Like with all the other articles, it is straight up readable JS, with WebGL graphics, no dependencies.
The animations and interactivity are great. I'm really impressed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#/media/Fil...
When looked from distance, it looks more like revolving around sun while getting effected by earth. Which is to say, th motion does not look like a spring/spiral at all, but like a wave instead.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/266426/what-does...
I guess in my mind this is just entertainment. I enjoy the visuals and interactivity, and marvel at the technical implementation, but I don't need to spend hours going through it. The only reason I would is if I actually wanted to learn this stuff, but so far nothing has come up that I need/want to learn at that level of detail.
I guess my question is, is this actually useful for education? Has anyone felt like they've really learnt something (ie. they could teach it to other people), after reading through one of these?
I was goofing around with the ciechanowski moon model and noticed that either this image or ciechanowski's simulation is flipped 180 (mirrored not rotated).
So I googled moon images to see which one might be flipped (it would be amazing if the ciechanowski model was inverted) but after looking at about 100 images, 90/100 or more seem to be composites based on the same image. Not just that the moon presents the same face, but all the google results look based on literally the same image. So what if that image is flipped?
On an oblique note, I assume google reports such repetitions to almost any search— I've noticed there's a web dark pattern for results repetitions; see Amazon and Netflix. And AI results appear to be an obscenely amped-up repeater.
I'm interested in repetitiond news too: take Google news without any personalization— how the web may create an appearance of copious information that's actually very limited, and maybe very biased or completely wrong— e.g., Mandela Effect.
For example news of U.S. foreign affairs is routinely absurdly biased and narrow, such as the new leader in Syria leading "rebels" as in SW rebel alliance and not noting we've got a $10,000,000 bounty on his head for being a terrorist.
(Ask what you can do for Russia, not what Russia can do for you)
I keep second-guessing my own perceptions, like I'm cherrypicking, but the effect seems rampant, where very narrow and obviously contestable views are repeated as truisms and appear as such across many outlets.
I just saw a documentary called "The Program" which one more in and endless series of hype products about UFOs— this one tries to politicize the topic as a huge coverup a la JFK.
But what seems funny to me is term UFO! It's a fascinating term in its own right as it is used as a determinative noun based on an acronym where the key trait is "unidentified". In the truest sense all studies of UFOs must reveal nothing, by definition. And they do reveal nothing. As did this documentary. You may have never noticed, but nothing is something!
The moon is sort of like this: the biggest nothing in world. Does it even matter which is right (vs left vs correct) view?— I can't be bothered to look up. Besides some guys went there and all they found was rocks. Who would have guessed?! They brought some back and they've been completely forgotten about and misplaced out of boredom and irrelevancy.
It was more interesting when the noon could still possibly be green cheese. Now it's just orbital mechanics— a celestial pinball machine. A giant fusion reactor pours energy out across a gradient and somehow gives rise to everything we are. (Yawn, I'm sleepy).
Newton on gravity:
The last clause of your second Position I like very well. Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus be essential & inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate inherent & essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by & through which their action or force {may} be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers.
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