My time-lapse camera in the attic is still working, though I resorted to adding an auto reboot once a week, because the Raspberry Pi is not acting too stable. And even then, sometimes it hangs. I blame the power supply. Because it’s always the power supply, right?
Anyway watching the sun’s track northward as spring advances has given me a much better instinctive feel for celestial mechanics. And that made me pay closer attention to the moon rise last month. After 40 years on this planet I just realized that the moon, being in the same orbital plane as the sun and earth, traces the same track as the sun. Whoa. That means my attic window is perfectly oriented to catch a nice time-lapse of the moonrise!
(Check out the planet riding with the moon up into the sky. It’s probably VEnus. Is there an astronomer in the audience that can tell me?)
Instead of putting the moon’s mechanics into my program, I took the wimpy way out and I built in the full 2014 tables for my location, which I got from USNO (Look! The US military does something other than killing people and breaking stuff. Go Navy!)
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