Tuesday, March 29, 2022

the shadow behind the Earth

Funny. Eerie?

Back on 18 March, John D asked me about the antisolar point.

Curious...  do you know if one can place the antisolar point on Stellarium?  I know how to determine that as a one off, but it's a drag to repeat often.

I was a little fuzzy and couldn't jump into the application immediately. I asked him if I had seen the "Earth's shadow" option in Stellarium? Or was I thinking about a different app? Starry Night? SkyTools?

A few hours later, he updated me on Stellarium:

Perhaps you didn't Blake.  However, good news:  ASP is a selectable item under Sky and View Settings on the Markings tab. There is the Antisolar Point option in the 3rd column.

How about that!

John shared that he was searching for Gegenschein and wanted to plan for where it should be in a dark moonless sky.

And then a weird thing happened. 

On a whim I looked into the Markings tab for the new Stellarium version 0.22.0.

There's checkboxes for the Earth's penumbra and umbra. Ha! Recently added.

I encouraged John to try the new version.

He was happy to see this feature (features?) added.

I think it funny weird timing.

Were they listening to us?! :-D

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