![]() ![]() They did! And even better (worse, it turns out) both Starry Night, and SkySafari, two completely independently created applications, gave almost exactly the same result! Everything seems to check out.Īfter a few hours of this, I checked with my confrere, Bill (our SkySafari developer) to see if they had the same discord with NASA predictions. Was this somehow rounding or another error in calculation? Nope.Were we taking the oblateness of the Earth into account? Yup.Were we perhaps using an old or imprecise value for the Earth's diameter? Nope."I'll figure this out", I say to myself confidently: That made all the difference to a few people. Normally no-one would even notice this, but in this case it changed our prediction for the April 4th, 2015 eclipse from a Total (as reported by NASA) to a Partial eclipse. The discrepancy was small in fact, the timings were exact, to the sub-second but the sizes of the Earth's shadows (both the umbra and penumbra) were too small by a very small but noticeable fraction. They just didn't match up exactly with what NASA (and other government sites) were reporting. One of our "power users" (who shall remain nameless for now) reported what he believed to be an issue with our calculations. Over the past few weeks, I've been involved in an exchange over the accuracy of Starry Night's eclipse predictions. Persistence, as in the case of Elmo and Becks, often pays off. It goes hand-in-hand with patience I think, something we can all agree is becoming scarce in this age of on-demand everything. Persistence is an extremely important quality, and some might say a disappearing quality these days. ![]() The short ends after Elmo, who pesters Becks to teach him to dribble a soccer ball on his head, learns a new word. One episode that sticks out in my mind, today more than ever perhaps, puts Elmo in a room with none other than David Beckham. Parents innately learn to tune him out, probably to moderate the risk of going insane listening to that same shrill voice on reruns day after day. Something about his high-pitched voice and ever-present smile I guess. Like most two years olds, my daughter loves Elmo. ![]()
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