cubinator

Everyone who's on them, universally, commends me for having never used the Rest Mass or Clock Noise, etc. and urges me to never join them. Doesn't that sound like maybe there's a problem there that should maybe get fixed? Every such thing nowadays is designed to be addicting, and to force users to play the algorithm game in a capitalism where the currency is popularity. I got a free website of sorts instead to just write about whatever I want, and even that I had to twist and force to stop it from filling with "engagement", so I could make it look as boring and bland as I care to, and fill it only with what I make myself. I didn't like Vine when it was Vine and I'm not on Youtube to watch Vine. I do not watch shorts. I also do not watch ads. If there's an ad that somehow manages to force itself onto my screen, I avert my eyes.

Expecting snow today.

We had different options for like a day when the forum switched to its current host. I'm fine without. Anything more complicated than a 'Like' can go in a post and be constructive.

6033

Shiny!

I think I agree with placing it above Obi-Wan and Mando s3. I was pretty disappointed with it overall, though, which is what I expected. It could have been so much more, I think. It felt like the script was written in an afternoon.

I had partial cloud cover but was able to see for a good while. I saw Venus too!

Happy eclipse day! For those not in the path or stuck under cloudy weather, you can watch online: https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-2023/2023-annular-eclipse-broadcast/ My forecast has been clouds all week, but I woke up to a clear blue sky today! I'm not in the path of annularity, but I'm very excited for a nice partial solar eclipse! I think my last solar eclipse was in 2017, and this time I'll have solar telescopes!

Me making an autonomous bug farm in a glovebox

Yep.

Hearing that makes me feel like the asteroid is a relative.

Indeed, it's beyond crowdfunding, but it makes me wonder what could be done with sticking a satellite body around a typical 8" mirror and launching a bunch of them, it might be something that public observers could select targets kind of like the ground based robotic telescopes. I'd still be more excited about space-based radio interferometry though.

Would be nice to have one on standby for the next interstellar visitor too.

Some of the issues have been mitigated, but I guess it's not as though the satellites weren't there at all.

How was the capsule spun up? Part of the release mechanism, I'd guess?

That's in VI.

I estimated the separation between the binary planets to be around 1 billion km.

I think they are probably still very hot, as these are probably < 1 million year old planets.

The worst part is they could have had his character actually tell a meaningful, thought-provoking story in that moment, but they really just went for the self-aware reference. And the new galaxy has nothing new in it.

Here's my summed error result, in radians, for the first run of this code. I ran through 6.8 million scenarios out of 10 million I'd originally set it to go through. 1414 'interesting' scenarios were stored. I'm not sure why the error is able to jump up occasionally, but the trend is how I'd like it to be. Using the lowest point on this graph, and t2CA and t1UK as baseline yields a distance of 32 million km - this indicates a larger error than expected overall. Smaller error means smaller difference between Mars' position in the sky for different observers, which is caused by greater distance. So I'm not running into my fear of getting an error that's somehow too small yet. And I haven't taken into account Mars' angled entry and exit behind the Moon yet. So I think I'm in a good position so far.

I've reorganized my code to be a lot neater in general, and generate more useful information. Instead of storing every possible scenario, it runs the general occultation calculation in a function, and checks each time whether the error is the smallest it's seen. Only then does it append the data onto an array of scenarios. So I can run through 1 million combinations of parameters while only storing (and having to look at) 1400 progressively-smaller ones. This should allow me to run the calculation at a high resolution without worry of slowing MATLAB to a halt or generating gigabytes of garbage data. I've also added a couple new calculated parameters that should allow me to write an intuitive visualization of the occultation from all three locations that clearly shows the error in the calculation, and eventually could let you see the parallax with your own eyes! - if my math and our observational accuracy is good enough.

12 of them stacked together is a mile.

Looks like the front fell off. That is a big thing.

The issue I'm having with the errors is that they are out of order. For instance, at the rightmost low point on the latest graph, the errors are, in rad/1000: CA t2 -.2234 CA t4 .0608 MN t1 .1004 MN t2 .0212 MN t3 -.0044 MN t4 .0553 UK t1 .739 UK t4 -.6674 Some are positive, meaning the event is predicted later than observed, and some are negative, meaning the event is predicted earlier. Notice how CA t2 is negative and CA t4 is positive. t2 looks like this: And t4 looks like this: So if we are measuring the Moon-Mars center distance at those times, t2 will be smaller than 1 Moon radius (negative error) and t4 will be greater (positive error). Mars' angular size was estimated earlier to be around 20 arcseconds, which is around 0.1 rad/1000, close to the size of this difference in error. I need to implement a better estimate of Mars' angular size that takes into account the offset path behind the Moon and the variable Moon angular rate, and use that to estimate the error. I also need to make a code that, instead of saving every worthless value, only saves the 'good' sets of parameters as it's sweeping through. These changes should make it easier for me to find good estimates of everything, AND easier to make visualizations of the event - like the MS Paint drawings above, but with actual data! If I calculate the occultation path for each location, I might also be able to constrain the estimate to cases where Mars has the same angular size between all locations. Hmm, maybe I should look back at trying to find an analytical solution...

Update: It crawled to a halt as I expected it would. This is how far it got: It got through about 2% of one value of Moon distance. You can see it sort of shallow out a bit, but it's not enough to know if there's a better estimate elsewhere. I'll see what this data says. As you can see, there is a lot of calculation effort that is not ultimately needed.