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.
I haven't realized Andromeda is 4x bigger than the Moon until I tried to take a picture of it
https://mikkolaine.blogspot.com/2014/01/size-of-deep-sky-obj... (not my picture)
Andromedia the closest galaxy to Milky Way (MW) is estimated to have one trillion stars while MW itself is estimated to have 250 billions. God really knows how many of them really exist and who's counting anyway? It's a blind faith at its worst to pretend we know the numbers since it's most likely that the earth and its sun bound astronomers (including the farthest distance ever Voyager spacecraft) are several orders of magnitudes off the marks.
It's also estimated that's more than a trillion number of stars inside the two galaxies (Andromeda and MW), not number of planets, not even the number of moons (the very title of this HN post).
Overall it's also estimated that there's more than a trillion number of galaxies (not stars) inside our universe.
To make matter even more complicated, all of these celestial objects are moving in very high speed relative to each others and none is static. These galaxy are millions or billions light years away from earth and by the time their EM signals has reached earth, they probably have already dissappeared or morphed into something else.
How about non observable part of the universe?
How about other parallel universes that physicists claim to exist?
My personal conclusion to this mind boggling facts is that to assume and conclude there is only earth that has living creatures is very much premature and naive.
I think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.
For astronomy, they probably won't make a difference, but it shouldn't be impossible to make goggle technology that converts astronomically interesting wavelengths to the visible spectrum.
the post you replied to is not wanting to see like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation; in real time. they're (at least I think they are) wanting to visualize already captured information, such as x-ray and radio emissions overlaid a view of the night sky.
Maybe I misunderstood this part then?
Laying down on your back, plopping a nice pair on your eyes and just looking at the moon is a fantastic experience. Aside from much better UX, binoculars also have depth-perception which makes the visuals all that more engaging.
If you have really nice clear sky in your area you can easily do that with stars and some planets as well.
We watched it every night through binoculars.
Marvelous clean air - humidity around 0%, just some dust. No light pollution (there wasn't an electricity grid in some 100km around, just a handful of small diesel aggregates).
The binoculars were more than enough to see the comet, its tail. And even get a feeling of the tail arcing in three dimensions.
I still occasionally drag my friends out to look at the moons on a clear night. It's my favorite bit of practical astronomy to share.
I think instead of an eyepiece (or in addition to one) most consumer telescopes should include a usb image sensor that can screw into where the eyepiece is.
"Wow so many lights" is the first answer I can think about right away
I became kind of fascinated with the craters, names of the craters (and history of those names), the "dark-side" and all the wild topology there. (Although I think I have tiles for the entire Moon, you don't have the fuel to get there.
I remember playing another moon lander 35 years ago in school on the swedish computers "Compis". Was a very basic version but I still loved it, it's something with slow heavy objects where you need to plan ahead what, when and how much you need to do.
if y'all only care about the game: https://mooncraft2000.com/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1739314565?ref_=pe_3052080_3975148...
However, those long exposures are much more likely to get photobombed by an airplane or satellite. So you're really better off taking shorter exposures with the highest ISO you can get away with, and then just stacking them.
I have a much wider scope that I can do 30s exposures unguided before trailing starts to become noticeable. If you can get away with 15s, you'd be amazed at what you can achieve with newer sensors.
Just some hints to help the disappointment at bay and maybe get you playing with the toys
I also bought a Seestar S50 last year and have been having an absolute blast with it. Feels like a renaissance in astronomy is upon us.
I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.
The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.
Moon over Menlo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/24118398766/
Moon, Mars, Venus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/16598905865/
The shadows are very much my favorite part of this kind of shot. It provides so much visual texture to the surface, showing not only how rough it is but how smooth it is. the 'scar' to the bottom right (aka Alpine Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallis_Alpes) is always one of my favorites.
Thanks again!
(startup/app idea!)
Pretty much every telescope owner will happily show you the sky - after you've made an effort finding out where they gather, or if you just happen to walk by. The instagrammification of astronomy, with hordes of influencers rolling by without concern for the subject matter, just to insert themselves everywhere, is too horrible to consider.
It's not hard to find. Type "<city> astronomical society" into your search box. They have public websites, horribly outdated. Reach out to them, join the group, and you're more than welcome. But may there never be "an app for that"
There are tons of sites listing them, but I doubt there's an absolute exhaustive list as it's all self-reporting to each of the sites. Your app idea would just be another in a list of places, sort of like the xkcd app about yet another standard.
https://www.go-astronomy.com/star-parties.htm
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/annual-starg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/pmlbne/jupiter_...
i'm sure with tracking and stacking it would be much more.
It also depends a lot on atmospherics, if there is a lot of turbulence in the atmosphere it makes things less crisp (well, “dancey”, like looking through a heat haze.)
Look up your local astronomy group and go along one night, and see for yourself before buying anything. Saturn isn’t great at the moment (assuming London-ish latitudes) but Jupiter is around all night and you should be able to see it through a variety of scopes and eyepieces if you went along to a sky party.
Honestly, the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope I nearly cried. Truly amazing.
The one for Moon is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/on-moon-118130286
/s
This kind of thing seems like a truly outstanding resource, and I'm happy to pay for it, with the desire to have this for when my kids get older.
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.
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!
In English, the "d" for "decreasing" also works in lowercase, I guess that you can use "p" for "progressing".
I'm speechless
Hey, that's the first the time I realized this.
Also full moon rises the highest in winter, contrary to the sun - when it’s at it’s lowest[1].
Funny things happen at the poles where sun is above/below horizon for half a year: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/27750
[1] the further from equator you are the more pronounced it is.
I'd love to spend my time working on such articles when I'm retired :)
No cookie banner, no pop ups, no sponsored links or ads. Just amazing hand-crafted web content.
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/
Could you explain further?
Like with all the other articles, it is straight up readable JS, with WebGL graphics, no dependencies.
Only kidding. Cool stuff, wish it were split up though
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...
It looks like a dodecagon with rounded corners, but the video goes into more details.
Color space is taken proper care of, and for images as rendered from the Earth point of view, there is a model of the atmosphere, so that the sky looks blue during the day and the Moon looks red at the horizon.
There are no pre-calculated images and only 3 photos. All the shading is done in real time using realistic models.
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!
Here's the website that coined the term: https://explorabl.es/
I took a crack at making it slightly nicer to write this style of blog post via markdown with codeblocks you can mark to execute instead of display (and hot reload + gist rendering support)
It makes the source easy to read, even on GitHub preview, etc.
It's what I've been using to write my recent posts.
https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/mdxish
But at the end of the day, content itself and the code that powers it is more important than any framework you might use.
That observable system you made here sure renders beautifully.
I agree that these interactive learning materials are incredibly promising towards actually understanding what is being presented. In other words, this is how I actually grok the concept.
That said, Ciechanowski is on another level entirely.
I've thought a lot about this – every time a new one is posted. I wish we could live in a world where this is what STEM education looks like. I think that, ultimately, it's just very high labor cost, and edtech is not known for being highly lucrative.
Bartosz does these as a labor of love, and the world is better off for it.
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:
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?
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...
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?
Also nice that the author didn't minify it. Interesting to read through.
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.
"Eight major planets, the outer four are gas giants. Planets 2 and 3 are nearly the same size. All of the other planets, edge-to-edge, fit just inside the orbit of my planet and its moon."
Whoah, hold the "AI" hype train there: I didn't design it that way, but an LLM is close to the worst possible thing you could use for this.
1. LLMs are incapable of real math or symbolic logic, so they aren't able to you whether your statement is approximately-true, and they can't tell you if it's useful either. (Lots of planets are spherical.)
2. You're trying to communicate with literal aliens that won't have any of that English training data the LLM draws from. They don't have any preconceptions about a "second" and "year" being related but one is bigger, they won't see the same colors or even have a 1:1 color sense, and they absolutely won't be inferring that Jupiter and Saturn are connected by pantheon-naming.
A lifetime exile from your entire species and culture is not something you want to leave to an LLM.
I was trying to describe how, in the future when we have surveys of thousands of other star systems, it would be fun if there was a website that played the role of the aliens. We would describe to it in plain language what our system looked like and it would tell us if we did a good enough job to get home or not. To me, this means finding how many rows match in a database. I'm not sure how to turn plain language into a database query but, if pressed, today I'd reach for an LLM.
This made me happy.
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.)
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.
I don't know how people don't see how poor quality so much AI writing is, even when referencing good quality work.
Also making effective visualizations that do a good job of illustrating a concept is not just a matter of being able to write the code.
Sometimes it's clearly visible, but often I agree that it's hard to tell if you're imagining it or not.
I wonder if single word titles helps with SEO
https://www.google.com/search?q=Moon
right on front page #7 . good job
But I do prefer metric units.
― Rumi
The animations and interactivity are great. I'm really impressed.
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.
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.
It really is a page of Art.
If there is only a few thing I could nitpick. Sections or indicator of how long the article is. The Moon is long... very long. And I understand why he want Image on load just to save bandwidth but personally I hate when image only start to load and appear when I scroll close to it.
I hope this will inspire a new generation of people to rethink about Front End.
This is an example of frontend as a craft. I am confident it was written with a model M keyboard and his home office is referred to as an atelier.
