I enjoy doing sudoku puzzles, I sometimes do 2–3 puzzles before I go to sleep. It relaxes me. I’m an average player, I usually solve hard puzzles (evil setting in Websudoku) in under 10 minutes, without pencil markers as I like to exercise my memory. My record time is 4:36 minutes, but I sometimes struggle very much and I’ve had puzzles that took 40 minutes to solve. My average is around 12 minutes.
Some puzzles are harder to figure out than others even with the same difficulty level, but my time also depends on how I feel at that particular…
TL;DR: here is the link to the simulation: http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/eclipse2017.html
A few years ago, I programmed jsOrrery, a Solar System simulation in the browser. It’s been a while since I added features to it, but with this summer’s eclipse date coming near, I wanted to see if I could view it in the simulation.
Computing the Moon’s exact position over time is not a simple problem, so much so that it has eluded scientists for centuries. The orbits of celestial bodies can normally be determined quite accurately using a simple geometric formula involving a few numbers called orbital elements. …
Note: this is a story I originally wrote in 2013
jsOrrery is a Solar System / orbital mechanics simulation, or orrery, that I wrote in WebGL and Javascript. It is based on a previous 2D simulation that I made in Flash, but that was not accurate, nor much interesting for that matter. There are other nice Javascript orreries out there, but what makes jsOrrery stand out is that it is a realistic visualisation instead of being an artistic or schematic one.
In the following post, I outline some of the challenges I faced when building jsOrrery. I won’t give code…
