[Chaos-l] SkySafari

[Robert Nielsen]

I think a lot of you know that I use a planetarium program on my iPad (and iPhone) when observing ... including to control my telescope.  Well, the guys who developed it were annoyed that the position of the asteroid that will buzz Earth in a couple of days (2012 DA14) wasn't quite right ... because they were just using Kepler equations to compute the position ... so they went on an 80-hour coding marathon, consulted with JPL, and now have an more accurate n-body algorithm to calculate its position.

Crazy, right?  All this on a smartphone! (or tablet in my case)

The following link shows a video where one of the developers demonstrates the new feature.   What is amazing is that as the asteroid passes the Earth, the orbit is modified by Earth's gravity, and you can actually see it change in the app!   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOYCzfvnrbQ

Robert
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rtpnet.org/pipermail/chaos-l/attachments/20130212/d7ab2dc7/attachment.html>