Following on from yesterday’s post about orreries, I’ve decided to do a quick release with two changes. First, the promised option to disable the click noise. I’ve also turned the volume down on it a bit, when it is enabled. Secondly, rounding out the planets, as defined by science, Solar Explorer now has information about
I had an interesting comment from appear on the Lite edition of Solar Explorer today. “Lovely graphics but not an orrery as motion not realtime and orbits very wrong. Would be better without relative stats, and switch off clicks.” Not an orrery? That was news to me – I didn’t even know what an orrery
I can’t believe that five years ago today, the 24th of August, Pluto was demoted from planet to the category of dwarf planet. Pluto is not a big object, and since it’s discovery in 1930 we’ve found a number of other objects that are of a similar size, or even larger. If Pluto is considered
News recently made the rounds that a Russian outfit called Orbital Technologies had thrown their hat into the ring for giving future civilian astronauts a destination for their journey. It’s a small space station with four “hotel” rooms (aka cupboards), providing accommodation for up to seven guests at a time. Amenities include real water showers
Cassini has to considered to be the quiet achiever of space probes. It left Earth in 1997, arriving at Saturn in 2004. After Huygens touched down on Titan, Cassini has largely been forgotten by the public while superstars like the Voyager twins set new distance and longevity records, and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers discover
In this weeks update, I added a couple of new planet structure definitions for Saturn and Uranus into Solar Explorer. I’d been putting these two off for a while since they have rings and the code I wrote to swap the planet between the cutaway view and normal view couldn’t handle them, so they were
Another update for Solar Explorer, and I’ve been extra busy this time. Apart from a minor fix, I’ve added some more planet structures for Mars and Jupiter and tweaked the update I did last week for low resolution phones. While adding the extra detail to Jupiter, I found out that we really don’t know much
In keeping with the solar-system-is-wet theme I’ve had going of late, I read an article earlier this week about the discovery of a huge cloud of water vapour in a galaxy 12 billion light years from our home. The scientists that made this announcement have calculated the this cloud contains 140 trillion times more water
In a previous post I commented that the Solar System is soaking wet. Today we learned that there’s rain falling on Saturn. OK, so it’s not exactly a downpour. The “rain” is water vapor that’s being sprayed into space by ice volcanoes on Enceladus, a tiny fraction of which ends up raining onto Saturn. This
I have something I need to get off my chest. I’m finding that I’m not liking Google as much as I used to. I recently realised that I’d started to feel this way around the time that I decided to become an Android developer, and it’s only been getting worse since then. Becoming an App