Virtual Astronomy

lol, all I did was make a few jokes, and look what it spawned!

I'm sorry to say that you're ALL wrong...

Us Amazons have known for centuries that our dearly beloved SL world is a multi faceted shape consisting of at least 8 sides. Each side is of course flat, othewise everything would roll to the edge.

I assume that the 'short' days you reffer to are by comparison to some other planet I have no knowledge of that has longer days... what is the use of longer days? Untill the first expeditionary settelers arrived on our beloved SL ( a while back now) our time system ran from sunrise to sunrise, so you can imagine our confusion having the 24 hour system imposed on us. Five sunrises a day... bah...

Another assumption that the newcomers have made is that there is but one sun. The mystics of Amazon Nations realised long ago that there are infact FOUR bodies that revolve around our beloved home. Three of which form a perfect triangle, orbiting high above us and keeping station with each other. These glow and give us the light that we call day. The fourth object orbits much closer and faster, in fact three times faster so that it never appears in the sky at the same time as one of the suns. At least it never does on the facet on which we live. Many years ago an expedition was sent to find the edge of our facet and cross to another. The aim was to prove that 1) at a facet edge you could see more than one sun and 2) that on another facet you would see both a sun and the moon simulaneously. They never returned to confirm our theories...

To end on a lighter note. There once was a High Priestess who tried to put about the theory that our three suns were infact a stable trinary system of "normal" stars, and that our beloved SL was not the center of the universe but just happened to be trapped in the gravity well created between the suns. She sumized that the gravitational effect of the fast orbiting moon made SL wobble slightly, explaining the slight differences in day length as the seasons changed... LOL Have you ever heard such rubbish? Everyone had a good laugh at her, then she was put to death for heracy.

Incidently, reference was made in an earlier post to the "twinkling" of the stars... This is of course further proof of the mutli-faceted nature of the planets in our universe.

The "stars" that we see in the night sky are, of course, other planets, and not other suns as some have speculated. As our three suns revolve around SL, their light is ocasionaly reflected back off the flat sides of nearby planets. Hence the twinkling effect. A spherical planet as put forward by some heretics would give a constant reflection. It can also be assumed that some of these planets may indeed have their own suns orbiting around them, thus giving a diferent twinkle rate.

The fact that the planets do not move in the night sky, also as reported earlier in this thread (miss-reported as 'stars'), is further proof that our beloved SL is in fact stationary with her suns rotating around it...

what kind of nonsense it that? Everyone knows that the lights in the night sky are the spirits of unsubscribed avatars placed upon the cube of the sky by The Programmer, and are merely a few meters higher than an avatar can fly.

If we were in the northern hemisphere, the sun would not appear to travel so far to the north. You HAVE to be in the southern hemisphere for that. For example, let's say you are in San Francisco. How many days of the year is the vertical ray of the sun *north* of San Francisco?

Zero! The sun doesn't even "go north" of Los Angeles. If you live in LA and you look at the northern wall of a building, you can rest assured (unless it was moved and reoriented) that that wall has NEVER been in direct sunlight.

If I recall correctly, the sun ranges from 23.5 degrees north of the equator to 23.5 degrees south of the equator. (Los Angeles is about 33 degrees north, San Francisco further north than that.) In neither of these cities has the sun EVER been directly overhead!

So, you see, the only way for the sun to appear FAAAAR to the north is for you to observe it from pretty far south of the equator. The phenomenon I reported on would indicate that the northern hemisphere was in summer, and the southern hemisphere was in winter.

Now, if the sun has an extreme north/south range - that is, if SL's planet has a HELL of a wobble - maybe that would explain it. But I think it would have to wobble more than 90 degrees for that to happen.

Intersting fact: We do not get even one milliwatt of heat from the sun. (The real one, not the bitmap one.)

We don't? Then where does the heat come from?

Huns: Well, the entire argument is academic anyway, given that no one has yet offered any evidence that the world is anything other than flat. It's fine to use metaphors to describe observed motions of the sun and the moon, but they're just metaphors.

Nergal: I think Huns is referring to the strict physics definition of heat, which is kinetic energy transmitted from particle to particle. Not many particles in space, so not much heat gets transmitted. See, for example, this link.

I tend to think people who make that argument should be dressed in winter garb and dropped in the middle of the Sahara at midday, the better to ponder whether the sun's heat does or doesn't reach earth.

-Jay

None of the sun's heat reaches the earth. The space between here and there is very near to absolute zero temperature-wise. Heat is a measure of kinetic energy, but you need actual atoms for that. Photons are not atoms - they are wierd wave/particle conglomerations.

Where we get heat is from photons coming in from the sun. These collide with air molecules, water, water vapor, ground, etc. This imparts some of the photon's energy, causing them to heat up.

Boy wouldn't that be nice

Okay, my observations from my property are inconsistent with the prior 2003 post, based upon a single observation, sunrise is at 9:25 pm SLT, not 10:25 pm as suggested. This indicates that the sun may in fact rise and set at different times in different regions.

In addition, at this time of year, the sun appears to be setting to the far north on my particularly property.

Does anyone have a script for Solar position?

There was a complex solar/lunar prim model written by Ezhar Fairlight, as well as work done by a few others.

As for the differing sunrises and whatnot, that's as likely due to being because of a server reboot than anything else.

Sadly, I think a lot of the interesting celestial/weather code has been sliced out of the client (for instance, the clouds being affected by avatars). Makes the "world" a lot less mysterious and playful...

We also need to remember that the world is ALOT bigger than it used to be back in the day of 03. If the Lindens have been updating the rotation of the sun/moon in accordance with the size of the world (assuming the client "World" has grown along with it, and not just them adding sims to the "World" because they anticipated needing ALOT more sims than originally) then it makes sense that the Sun/Moon rotation would in turn shift with the size of the world. Making the world bigger means making the rotation much larger, thus resulting in Longer Days and nights. Haven't really been on enough to notice if there is a big shift either way, since normally i'm working in darkness with local lighting doing tests .