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joetheblow
Comment #2 Friday, August 27, 2004 11:42 PM
Comment #2 Friday, August 27, 2004 11:42 PM
... this is SO FREAKING COOL!!!!
I was just thinking about this when I went outside because there is a full (almost) moon out.
I could use this to light up (or darken) other objects in DX.
Very cool!!! THANK YOU!!!!
I was just thinking about this when I went outside because there is a full (almost) moon out.
I could use this to light up (or darken) other objects in DX.
Very cool!!! THANK YOU!!!!
Alternate Setting
Comment #3 Saturday, August 28, 2004 12:55 PM
Comment #3 Saturday, August 28, 2004 12:55 PM
Your pieces really deserve more comment and encouragement Will.
Cheers
Cheers
Will Rose
Comment #4 Saturday, August 28, 2004 3:04 PM
Comment #4 Saturday, August 28, 2004 3:04 PM
Thanks journeyman, that's nice... Feel free to start a publicity campaign! 
MonsterTruck
Comment #5 Saturday, August 28, 2004 3:39 PM
Comment #5 Saturday, August 28, 2004 3:39 PM
AWESOME!!!!!
Thank you for making these wonderfull animated planets, they're the best thing since sliced bread! 
Thank you for making these wonderfull animated planets, they're the best thing since sliced bread!
kmlane
Comment #6 Saturday, August 28, 2004 7:59 PM
Comment #6 Saturday, August 28, 2004 7:59 PM
Brilliant! And thank you very much for the "Blue Marble." I have both of them spinning on my desktop. How about Mars, Venus, Saturn, etc. Or am I sounding too greedy...?
Will Rose
Comment #7 Saturday, August 28, 2004 10:01 PM
Comment #7 Saturday, August 28, 2004 10:01 PM
Well... I'm not sure I'm inspired to continue when LunaVista and Blue Marble only have 9's...
Alternate Setting
Comment #8 Sunday, August 29, 2004 12:30 AM
Comment #8 Sunday, August 29, 2004 12:30 AM
It's a Karma thing - you offer us the star's - we ensure you still have something to reach for too LOL
Will Rose
Comment #9 Sunday, August 29, 2004 2:56 AM
Comment #9 Sunday, August 29, 2004 2:56 AM
Well be careful how you swing that karma around! If you're thinking the animations of the other planets will be even better, forget it. The animation quality exhibited with LunaVista and Blue Marble is about the limit of what is currently possible. You'd better give the high scores now before the quality goes down! When DX supports MPEG-style image deltas you'll be able to give me an 11, but until then this is as good as it gets.
When DX supports MPEG-style image deltas you'll be able to give me an 11, but until then this is as good as it gets.
mr.bo
Comment #11 Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:45 PM
Comment #11 Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:45 PM
Wow, this is awesome. I made a moonphase object a few years back using DxToys, and have been thinking about getting someone to write a script for another one, but yours is so much nicer than the one I made. Very nice.
Will Rose
Comment #12 Wednesday, September 1, 2004 2:25 PM
Comment #12 Wednesday, September 1, 2004 2:25 PM
Thanks Frugus! I'm glad you like it. The couple of other "moon phase" objects I've seen (and I guess someone just released another one recently, although I didn't know it until a couple of days ago) is that they either didn't actually calculate the current phase, or they just did a "quarter-moon" "half-moon" etc sort of thing, and I've never found that very satisfying. The moon changes every night, so why not show that accurately? My personal taste is for things to be as realistic as possible.
Telfear
Comment #13 Thursday, September 2, 2004 6:18 AM
Comment #13 Thursday, September 2, 2004 6:18 AM
While the moon does roatate....we only see about 55% of it 
Will Rose
Comment #14 Thursday, September 2, 2004 2:28 PM
Comment #14 Thursday, September 2, 2004 2:28 PM
Telfear: yeah, but that would be a pretty boring animation. People seemed to like my "Earth - The Blue Marble" object, even though most people see about 0% of the earth from space.
Cylon99
Comment #15 Wednesday, December 15, 2004 7:41 PM
Comment #15 Wednesday, December 15, 2004 7:41 PM
Something I noticed when I put Blue Marble and LunaVista on my desktop at the same time - your Moon rotates backwards! Like the sun and all of the planets besides Venus, the Moon rotates counterclockwise.
It might be cool to make a second version of LunaVista that is the correct relative size to your Blue Marble object - 1/4 the diameter. Of course I'd need a desktop a few meters wide to show the distance with the same scale!
It might be cool to make a second version of LunaVista that is the correct relative size to your Blue Marble object - 1/4 the diameter. Of course I'd need a desktop a few meters wide to show the distance with the same scale!
Will Rose
Comment #16 Thursday, December 16, 2004 4:07 AM
Comment #16 Thursday, December 16, 2004 4:07 AM
Cylon, Lunavista doesn't rotate "backwards". It rotates in the direction the user specifies in the animation tab. Also, if you stop to think about it, you'll realize that concepts like "counterclockwise" have no meaning in three-dimensional space. Whether a sphere revolving on an internal axis is said to revolve "clockwise" or "counterclockwise" depends solely on the perspective of the observer. Turn the observer upside down, and he will change his opinion on direction. This is what happens with Earth's moon. People in Australia, as opposed to people in the US, may be thought of as being "upside down" and thus see the shadow (the moon's phase) on the opposite-handed side of the moon compared to U.S. observers, and would report that the moon rotates in the opposite direction (if the rotation could be observed from the earth, that is.)
Cylon99
Comment #17 Friday, December 17, 2004 1:07 PM
Comment #17 Friday, December 17, 2004 1:07 PM
Heck, if I'd known there was a way to change the rotation myself, I wouldn't have bothered to post! I keep forgetting that pretty much everything about DesktopX objects is configurable even after they're written.
And as for the rotation, we're both right.
I was considering the planets from the viewpoint of an external observer in the plane of the planets' orbits, with north (up) arbitrarily the same as Earth's north. I like what you pointed out about Australia - when I was there, I saw maps that had the southern hemisphere on top (with the text turned around, they didn't just turn a regular map upside down) - and it looked like an alien planet!
Upside-down map Link
And as for the rotation, we're both right.
I was considering the planets from the viewpoint of an external observer in the plane of the planets' orbits, with north (up) arbitrarily the same as Earth's north. I like what you pointed out about Australia - when I was there, I saw maps that had the southern hemisphere on top (with the text turned around, they didn't just turn a regular map upside down) - and it looked like an alien planet!Upside-down map Link
Ferman
Comment #18 Friday, May 13, 2005 8:59 PM
Comment #18 Friday, May 13, 2005 8:59 PM
I know I'm coming in here a bit late, but... Really sweet object. I just have the moon phase one going now, since the rotation was making motion sick, but really sweet none-the-less.
Also, just a word on the rotation direction discussion... Cylon99 was right in saying that the Moon rotates in the same fashion as most of the planets. The Earth and Moon both have a positive rotation vector (using the right hand rule). All of the planets, aside from Venus and Uranus, have their geographic north pole parallel to that of the Sun's (geographic north being defined as the direction of the rotation vector). Venus rotates anti-parallel, and Uranus, of course, rotates at a right angle. This isn't arbetrary; rather it's a consequence of the conservation of angular momentum during the formation of the Solar System.
Also, just a word on the rotation direction discussion... Cylon99 was right in saying that the Moon rotates in the same fashion as most of the planets. The Earth and Moon both have a positive rotation vector (using the right hand rule). All of the planets, aside from Venus and Uranus, have their geographic north pole parallel to that of the Sun's (geographic north being defined as the direction of the rotation vector). Venus rotates anti-parallel, and Uranus, of course, rotates at a right angle. This isn't arbetrary; rather it's a consequence of the conservation of angular momentum during the formation of the Solar System.
Will Rose
Comment #19 Saturday, May 14, 2005 3:21 PM
Comment #19 Saturday, May 14, 2005 3:21 PM
Ferman, I'm glad you like the objects, and I love discussions like this so I'll chime in again! 
You are of course correct about why many (though not all) bodies in the solar system rotate in the way they do, and I didn't imply that the rotation of one planetary body is arbitrary with respect to another (although that is true in the case of captured bodies, such as some of the satellites of the outer planets).
However, as I said, the perceived rotation of any internally revolving body, i.e. does it go left to right or right to left, or spin like the hands of a clock, is totally derived from the vantage point and orientation of the observer. Even if the axis is defined relative to the ecliptic plane or galactic plane, our galactic plane is not the same as that of other galaxies, and the handedness would still depend on what side of the galaxy you were on when observing.
The most precise you could be would be to say something like: This body has a rotational axis tilted positive/negative X degrees from the galactic plane of the XYZ galaxy with a righthanded/lefthanded direction of rotation, when viewing the XYZ galaxy from a point directly opposed to the ABC galaxy on the line connecting the galactic centers of ABC and XYZ.
Such a statement describes a specific observational line in space, and allows an authoritative statement on that basis. Anything less precise than that, and the truthfullness of the statement is "arbitrary" based on the perspective of the observer. Everything's relative. Even if all nine (10?) planets in our system rotated in identical fashions, the description of that preceived rotation depends on the perspective of the observer.
Ok, now back to our regularly scheduled programming!
You are of course correct about why many (though not all) bodies in the solar system rotate in the way they do, and I didn't imply that the rotation of one planetary body is arbitrary with respect to another (although that is true in the case of captured bodies, such as some of the satellites of the outer planets).
However, as I said, the perceived rotation of any internally revolving body, i.e. does it go left to right or right to left, or spin like the hands of a clock, is totally derived from the vantage point and orientation of the observer. Even if the axis is defined relative to the ecliptic plane or galactic plane, our galactic plane is not the same as that of other galaxies, and the handedness would still depend on what side of the galaxy you were on when observing.
The most precise you could be would be to say something like: This body has a rotational axis tilted positive/negative X degrees from the galactic plane of the XYZ galaxy with a righthanded/lefthanded direction of rotation, when viewing the XYZ galaxy from a point directly opposed to the ABC galaxy on the line connecting the galactic centers of ABC and XYZ.
Such a statement describes a specific observational line in space, and allows an authoritative statement on that basis. Anything less precise than that, and the truthfullness of the statement is "arbitrary" based on the perspective of the observer. Everything's relative. Even if all nine (10?) planets in our system rotated in identical fashions, the description of that preceived rotation depends on the perspective of the observer.
Ok, now back to our regularly scheduled programming!
xJoSePHsx
Comment #20 Saturday, May 21, 2005 4:46 PM
Comment #20 Saturday, May 21, 2005 4:46 PM
I've seen that object desktop.. it's really amazing...
but i've seen and the shadow's invert..
in the another object phase of moon, the static.. someone writes a code to change this error... how I can change the same mistake here??
but i've seen and the shadow's invert..
in the another object phase of moon, the static.. someone writes a code to change this error... how I can change the same mistake here??
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Comment #1 Friday, August 27, 2004 10:02 AM