Collaborate Disseminate
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is so ingrained into our modern life that it’s easy to forget the system was created for, and is still operated by, the United States military. While there are competing technologies, such as GLONASS and Galileo, they are still operated by the governments of their …read more
Continue reading Building a GPS With Bug Eyes And Ancient Wisdom
Kids – they’re such a treasure. One minute you’re having a nice chat, the next minutes they’re testing your knowledge of the natural world with a question like, “Why can we see the Moon during the day?” And before you know it, you’re building a CNC Earth-Moon orbital model.
We’ve got to applaud [sniderj]’s commitment to answering his grandson’s innocent question. What could perhaps have been demonstrated adequately with a couple of balls and a flashlight instead became an intricate tellurion that can be easily driven to show the relative position of the Earth and Moon at any date; kudos …read more
Continue reading CNC Tellurion Lets You See the Earth and Moon Dance
[gocivici] threatened us with a tutorial on positional astronomy when we started reading his tutorial on a Arduino Powered Star Pointer and he delivered. We’d pick him to help us take the One Ring to Mordor; we’d never get lost and his threat-delivery-rate makes him less likely to pull a Boromir.
As we mentioned he starts off with a really succinct and well written tutorial on celestial coordinates that antiquity would have killed to have. If we were writing a bit of code to do our own positional astronomy system, this is the tab we’d have open. Incidentally, that’s exactly …read more
Continue reading Star Track: A Lesson in Positional Astronomy With Lasers