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- Very nice! Nitpick: the Moon is tidally locked, so it should always face the Earth with the same side.by artemave
- Thank you all for the comments and showing the weaknesses in the model and visualisation. I'll try to understand the issues and fix them soon.by qunabu
- Really cool project! I always struggled to understand the motion of the planets looking at 2D images in textbooks. So I really enjoyed the ability to click and drag to explore the motion of the planets in 3D. I think it helps me build a more accurate mental modal of our solar system.
I also loved the music and narration, I'm curious what you used to create the narration? I noticed the narrator seemed to struggle with numbers sometimes, for example on step 1: "The Sun is ~333 000× heavier" The ~333 000× portion does not seem to be read properly. Not sure if that's only a problem I am experiencing on my browser though.
by simon145 - This was a lot of fun to explore. I find that naturally I want to click through the animations and observe them for a while before delving into the steps and reading the blurb. It's a bit like skimming around a textbook's headings & figures before reading the chapter, it builds motivation and interest.
One simply change to improve the experience is to keep the Next/Back at fixed locations. The animations and transitions are beautiful, and looking away to chase the moving buttons causes me to drop the visual context.
As a workaround I set the height of .tour-body to 900px and the the whole thing became so much more immersive, like the old planetariums.
by Syntonicles - This is nice.
I did laugh at how the Gravity built the Earth, with a tiny North America and all, and then as more mass was accumulated, North America got to get bigger and bigger and bigger!
by VikingCoder - >The Sun’s gravity (red arrow) pulls the Earth straight toward it the whole time — so why no collision? Because the Earth is also moving sideways (green arrow) at 29.8 km/s. Each moment it does fall toward the Sun, but its sideways speed carries it past — it keeps missing. The dashed line shows where inertia alone would send it; gravity bends that straight path into a closed loop. An orbit is simply falling, continuously, and always missing.
Reading stuff like this always makes me think "well that is fortunate." Of course there is survivorship bias so its not exactly surprising. But it also makes me wonder what could change the status quo.
I guess these are the things that could change it:
- suns becomes lighter (earth shoots into space)
- earth accelerates (earth shoots into space)
- sun becomes heavier (earth falls into sun)
- earth decelerates (earth falls into sun)
I guess in theory some large interstellar object could pass to close too earth and fling us off into space or into the sun.
by nonethewiser - I really liked your animations, but isn't step 14 incorrect? Earth's axis processes, but on a very long timescale. In the span of a day, the axis should be effectively stationary. That's why its the rotation 'axis' - it's the fixed line it rotates about. That's why Polaris is the north star: the axis of rotation points effectively directly at it at all times no matter the season. During summer in the northern hemisphere, the tilt is towards the sun, giving us more direct heating, and in the winter it's away from the sun. This isn't due to the axis moving, but due to the axis' relative position changing throughout earth's orbit around the sun.by jrflo
- Very nice, fairly efficient too.
I don't like the explicit split of Newtonian and relativistic gravity, this is often how it's presented in educational content, but it creates too much confusion; for instance it gives the illusion that they are somehow separate theories even though Newtonian gravity is a limiting case of Einsteinian gravity when v << c and gravitational fields are weak (see Poissons eq for Newtons gravitational potential.
Lastly, you should consider rendering spacetime similar to Alessandro Roussels spacetime visualization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwgIjBUYVc; probably the best and most innovative one I've seen.
by rfgplk