SH4's rendering of Sun and Moon

[Akula4745]

Geez... and I had trouble with algebra! LOL
Very interesting post... thanks for doing the detective work!

[Rockin Robbins]

@Radio: yeah, when we jump off the deep end, we take the risk of overwhelming people a bit! I hope you know I wasn't attacking you in any way in the other thread, just wondering how to explain it to people and despairing.

It keeps coming up that the sky in SH4 is very accurate and people can use celestial navigation to calculate positions within x hundred yards. Well, in real life that ain't possible, and I hope it's clear by watching the moon and sun fly across the sky at 3 in the afternoon, February 2, 1943, that SH4 didn't exactly take that into account.

And I hope it's clear by seeing the differences between the sizes, phase and positions at sunset, within one minute of the SH4 screenshot, that SH4 is seriously wrong. No celestial navigation involving Sun and Moon will be possible there. Forget it. It would be a waste of time. SH4 is no planetarium simulator. It has a sky with some stars in roughly the right place and two solar system objects in very wrong places.

I thought Kim Ronhoff's question was very interesting and I knew that college graduates today do not know what any uneducated farmer who couldn't spell his own name knew a hundred years ago: that the phase of the moon is tied to its position in the sky and its rise and set time. The new moon always sets at sunset. The full moon cannot rise at 9:00 pm.

And, rather than pull out the nasty equations, I happen to be an amateur astronomer with Patrick Chevalley's incredible Cartes du Ciel, a free astronomy program that can toss the math out the window and just show what I'm talking about. I can put you on the deck of a submarine in Dutch Harbor at 3 pm of February 2, 1943 to let you see for yourself that the sun really did fly across the sky without visibly rising or falling all afternoon! Would you have believed it had you not seen it? Math be damned, it isn't very good at communicating! Your garden variety physicist would argue that point.

As Isaac Assimov said, we live in a universe not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we CAN imagine. Who'da thought that a cheap computer game would be so sophisticated that it brought us face to face with one of the strangenesses?

And Dutch Harbor is a pretty cool place!

[Radio]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

@Radio:... I hope you know I wasn't attacking you in any way in the other thread, just wondering how to explain it to people and despairing.

Don't worry, I laughed with you about my post

Btw, did you ever try CELESTIA, it's an awesome astronomy freeware program.

[Pisces]

Well luckily for us 6SJ7GT's solution doesn't rely on SH4 rendering of the sky but does use a realistic planetarium program (Stellarium.org). The downside is that his links are dead for some time now. I'll see if I can find those files on my drives and upload it somewhere. But that might not be today.

[Rockin Robbins]

Yeah, I've looked at Celestia. It's very much a lightweight compared to Cartes du Ciel. Who says the French can't produce anything world class?

Well, actually, that's an unfair generalization. Celestia is made for the casual astronomy dabbler and does things like fictitious "how would our neighborhood look like from Alpha Centauri" and travel through the Solar System whiz bang stuff. People don't realize what astronomers don't know and how that affects such space travel simulation.

Cartes du Ciel is produced for use by astronomers, both amateur and professional and so has very different functions. In a way they kind of compliment each other. But Cartes du Ciel is very much more advanced in function for the amateur and professional astronomer. If you were to travel to the Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys, you'd see lots of people using Cartes du Ciel and nobody using Celestia or Stellarium.

[Radio]

Yep, they have totally different uses. Cartes du Sciel is a professional program to render stars and skies in a scientific manner, whereas Celestia is a mostly educational program.

I once tried Orbiter, but it's so.... difficult (in a lack of a better word), made me feel like this:

[Munchausen]

Originally Posted by Radio

I once tried Orbiter, but it's so.... difficult (in a lack of a better word), made me feel like this:

Successfully docking with the ISS in Orbiter is even more satisfying than sinking your first ship with manual TDC.