The Planets

this is close to being work on my not-work blog, but bear with me...
whilst camping in Norfolk we were star gazing in general wonder at the universe.
this simple past-time soon drew a crowd of fellow enthusiasts, all of us with very little knowledge of what's what up in the sky.
all this changed, however, when Joe joined us, with his amazing binoculars and more amazing knowledge of the stars and planets.
following his guidance we navigated around the milky way, found the pole star, and even gazed in awe at the Andromeda Galaxy, "a faint smudge on a moonless night".

truly amazing.

this wonder filled night brought to mind a wee experiment i thought about a while ago (watching Pitch Black of all things) - i wanted to program an animation of the solar system.

well - here it is.
still a work in progress, but you can zoom in and out (bottom slider), click and drag around, and speed up / slow down time, or even make time go backwards (bottom slider).
there is also a button that makes all the planets, moons, and Sun the correct relative diameters (messes with relative distances though).
making it was pretty simple, but even this simple model gave me a great sense of just how big our solar system is. and showed me just how small the earth is, as part of this amazingly delicate system.