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Cruithne, a tiny new "moon" for the Earth

Posted: 25.07.2002, 12:34
by Malcolm
This would be an interesting orbit for Celestia to model ! :

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/s ... 91029.html

Posted: 25.07.2002, 12:40
by Malcolm
" Near-Earth asteroid 3753 Cruithne "
I've just found it's (better) 'home'page :
http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html

Strange gyrations !
Perhaps Velikovsky (sp?) wasn't sooo far of the mark after all :)

co-orbital again

Posted: 26.07.2002, 11:24
by ogg
Thanks for the links people, I was trying to remember what this moon/asteroid was called when I was writing a post on the co-orbital moons of Saturn, bcos it's basically the same physics involved. Really counter-intuitive stuff, another nice 3-body problem that Keplerian orbits can't deal with.

Posted: 26.07.2002, 11:25
by ogg
woops, I mean: 'person'

Posted: 26.07.2002, 18:05
by person (alias Malcolm)
Hello ogg from malcolm,
no problem ( re: "woops, I mean: 'person' ) ,,,, there is just too much fun
to be had playing with Celestia so no probs when the finer details go astray
about who is saying what ,where, how & to whom :) <-- big grin symbol !
But for your pennance (!) see further down below ,,,

anyways,,, yes, on one of those pages I ref-ed it does talk about other co-orbital
'situations', but this is the first time I've seen it discussed in relation to a Lagrangian
point of view (frame of reference , or whatever is the right terminolgy !), very interesting,,,
and then the bit about " it may not remain this way after about 5000 years" set me thinking
back through a time warp to the days when things were so Newtonially
clockwork and simple; before the days of 'chaos' and 'strange attractors'-'butterfly
wings' and Mandelbrot. ! Alas poor Velicovsky, I didn't know him well :)
to mis-quote the bard !!

Pennance :
Could you (or someone) do me a favour ( favor for our friends across the pond),
I posted a short time ago about ' bumpmaps excluding nightlights ',
lots of folk viewed but no one told me if I was being silly,,,
could you poss. take a moment of time out and satisfy my curiosity f??? :--

Something like mercury that has has bump on/off (( was that you a while
ago that told me about ctrl-p )) already, then add (say,) earthnight.jpg
(or some other) NightTexture to its .ssc
Then see if you can display both the bumpmap effect AND the nightlights at
the same time ?
I didn't want to post in the 'Bugs' forum cos I didnt want to distract Chris from
his great works over summat that is prob. my stupidity :(

Sorry if the line-wraps go strange on this one, I'm typing it off line and now I am
going to try a copy&paste into the forum form ,,,,
Thanks,
Malcolm,
in SW England
and trying to shape up a Triton texture from an old Voyager tiff.