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Current Events & History

How Many Days Would February Have if the Earth Rotated Backward? Exploring Leap Years with Wolfram Language

Happy Leap Day 2024! A leap day is an extra day (February 29) that is added to the Gregorian calendar (the calendar most of us use day to day) in leap years. While leap years most commonly come in four-year intervals, they sometimes come every eight years. This is because a traditional leap day every four years is actually a slight overcompensation in the calendar. Thus, a leap year is skipped every one hundred years when those years are not divisible by 400 (this is actually the entire difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars).
Best of Blog

Computational Astronomy: Learning beyond the Stars with Wolfram Technologies

With Global Astronomy Month in full swing, it’s exciting to see the merging of Wolfram Language and the world of astronomy in so many different applications from our developers and users—from courses to books to projects on Wolfram Community. No matter where you’re at in your computational astronomy journey, the following resources will encourage you to go above and beyond.
Education & Academic

New in 13.2: The Beginnings of Astro Graphics

Last year we released Version 13.1 of the Wolfram Language. Here are the updates in astro computation since then, including the latest features in 13.2.

The Beginnings of Astro Graphics

In addition to being able to compute astronomical things, Version 13.2 includes first steps in visualizing astronomical things. There’ll be more on this in subsequent versions. But Version 13.2 already has some powerful capabilities.

As a first example, here’s a part of the sky around Betelgeuse as seen right now from where I am:

Zooming out, one can see more of the sky:

There are lots of options for how things should be rendered. Here we’re seeing a realistic image of the sky, with grid lines superimposed, aligned with the equator of the Earth:

And here we’re seeing a more whimsical interpretation:

Just like for maps of the Earth, projections matter. Here’s a Lambert azimuthal projection of the whole sky:

The blue line shows the orientation of the Earth’s equator, the yellow line shows the plane of the ecliptic (which is basically the plane of the Solar System), and the red line shows the plane of our galaxy (which is where we see the Milky Way).

If we want to know what we actually “see in the sky” we need a stereographic projection (in this case centered on the south direction):

There’s a lot of detail in the astronomical data and computations we have (and even more will be coming soon). So, for example, if we zoom in on Jupiter we can see the positions of its moons (though their disks are too small to be rendered here):

It’s fun to see how this corresponds to Galileo’s original observation of these moons more than 400 years ago. This is from Galileo:

The old typesetting does cause a little trouble:

But the astronomical computation is more timeless. Here are the computed positions of the moons of Jupiter from when Galileo said he saw them, in Padua:

And, yes, the results agree!

By the way, here’s another computation that could be verified soon. This is the time of maximum eclipse for an upcoming solar eclipse:

And here’s what it will look like from a particular location right at that time:

Education & Academic

New in 13.2: Introducing Astro Computation

Last year we released Version 13.1 of the Wolfram Language. Here are the updates in astro computation since then, including the latest features in 13.2.

Introducing Astro Computation

Astronomy has been a driving force for computation for more than 2000 years (from the Antikythera device on)... and in Version 13.2 it’s coming to Wolfram Language in a big way. Yes, the Wolfram Language (and Wolfram|Alpha) have had astronomical data for well over a decade. But what’s new now is astronomical computation fully integrated into the system. In many ways, our astro computation capabilities are modeled on our geo computation ones. But astro is substantially more complicated. Mountains don’t move (at least perceptibly), but planets certainly do. Relativity also isn’t important in geography, but it is in astronomy. And on the Earth, latitude and longitude are good standard ways to describe where things are. But in astronomy—especially with everything moving—describing where things are is much more complicated. Oh, and there’s the question of where things “are,” versus where things appear to be—because of effects ranging from light-propagation delays to refraction in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The key function for representing where astronomical things are is AstroPosition. Here’s where Mars is now:

What does that output mean? It’s very “here and now” oriented. By default, it’s telling me the azimuth (angle from north) and altitude (angle above the horizon) for Mars from where Here says I am, at the time specified by Now. How can I get a less “personal” representation of “where Mars is”? Because if even I just reevaluate my previous input now, I’ll get a slightly different answer, just because of the rotation of the Earth:

One thing to do is to use equatorial coordinates, that are based on a frame centered at the center of the Earth but not rotating with the Earth. (One direction is defined by the rotation axis of the Earth, the other by where the Sun is at the time of the spring equinox.) The result is the “astronomer-friendly” right ascension/declination position of Mars:

And maybe that’s good enough for a terrestrial astronomer. But what if you want to specify the position of Mars in a way that doesn’t refer to the Earth? Then you can use the now-standard ICRS frame, which is centered at the center of mass of the Solar System:

Often in astronomy the question is basically “which direction should I point my telescope in?”, and that’s something one wants to specify in spherical coordinates. But particularly if one’s “out and about in the Solar System” (say thinking about a spacecraft), it’s more useful to be able to give actual Cartesian coordinates for where one is:

And here are the raw coordinates (by default in astronomical units):

AstroPosition is backed by lots of computation, and in particular by ephemeris data that covers all planets and their moons, together with other substantial bodies in the Solar System:

By the way, particularly the first time you ask for the position of an obscure object, there may be some delay while the necessary ephemeris gets downloaded. The main ephemerides we use give data for the period 2000–2050. But we also have access to other ephemerides that cover much longer periods. So, for example, we can tell where Ganymede was when Galileo first observed it:

We also have position data for more than 100,000 stars, galaxies, pulsars and other objects—with many more coming soon:

Things get complicated very quickly. Here’s the position of Venus seen from Mars, using a frame centered at the center of Mars:

If we pick a particular point on Mars, then we can get the result in azimuth-altitude coordinates relative to the Martian horizon:

Another complication is that if you’re looking at something from the surface of the Earth, you’re looking through the atmosphere, and the atmosphere refracts light, making the position of the object look different. By default, AstroPosition takes account of this when you use coordinates based on the horizon. But you can switch it off, and then the results will be different—and, for example, for the Sun at sunset, substantially different:

And then there’s the speed of light, and relativity, to think about. Let’s say we want to know where Neptune “is” now. Well, do we mean where Neptune “actually is”, or do we mean “where we observe Neptune to be” based on light from Neptune coming to us? For frames referring to observations from Earth, we’re normally concerned with the case where we include the “light time” effect—and, yes, it does make a difference:

OK, so AstroPosition—which is the analog of GeoPosition—gives us a way to represent where things are, astronomically. The next important function to discuss is AstroDistance—the analog of GeoDistance.

This gives the current distance between Venus and Mars:

This is the current distance from where we are (according to Here) and the position of the Viking 2 lander on Mars:

This is the distance from Here to the star τ Ceti:

To be more precise, AstroDistance really tells us the distance from a certain object, to an observer, at a certain local time for the observer (and, yes, the fact that it’s local time matters because of light delays):

And, yes, things are quite precise. Here’s the distance to the Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon, computed 5 times with a 1-second pause in between, and shown to 10-digit precision:

This plots the distance to Mars for every day in the next 10 years:

Another function is AstroAngularSeparation, which gives the angular separation between two objects as seen from a given position. Here’s the result from Jupiter and Saturn (seen from the Earth) over a 20-year span:

Current Events & History

2020’s Winter Solstice Hosts the Greatest Conjunction in Nearly Four Hundred Years

On December 21, 2020, a visual astronomical spectacle will occur. The planets Jupiter and Saturn will pass so close to each other in the sky that, to the unaided eye, they will be difficult to separate. This is the closest the two planets have come in 397 years; the last time they were this close was July 16, 1623. When Jupiter and Saturn come close to each other in the sky as seen from Earth, this is known as a “great conjunction” and happens about every 20 years or so. But not all great conjunctions are as close as this one. The next great conjunction will be on November 5, 2040, and again on April 10, 2060, but the planets will be a bit over a degree apart, so not as close as the 2020 event. The next comparable event will be on March 15, 2080.

Education & Academic

Exploring the Enigmatic Star, Eta Carinae

One of the most enigmatic stars in our galaxy is η Carinae (Eta Carinae). However, in its first recorded observation several hundred years ago, Eta Carinae was a star of little note. Since then, it has become a source of astronomical interest due to dramatic brightness variations, which at one time made it the second-brightest star in the sky. In this post, we’ll investigate the star using the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Function Repository to discover why it’s changed in such a relatively short period of time, both in its appearance and in our interest in it.
Education & Academic

Star Light, Star Bright: Stellar Aperture Photometry with the Wolfram Language

Stellar CCD aperture photometry is the technique of extracting information about the brightness of stars from a series of images collected over time. The light curve of a variable star can reveal useful information about the physics of the star, including a measure of its intrinsic brightness. Light curve analysis can yield information about eclipsing binary systems, and also lead to exoplanet discoveries when a planet alters the brightness of a star by crossing its disk as viewed from Earth.

In CCD photometry, we want to be able to determine a measure of the amount of radiation coming from a given star arriving on our CCD detector. Plotted as a function of time, this measurement can reveal important information about the star or star system.

Education & Academic

Slicing Silhouettes of Jupiter: Processing JunoCam Images

With the images from the Juno mission being made available to the public, I thought it might be fun to try my hand at some image processing with them. Though my background is not in image processing, the Wolfram Language has some really nice tools that lessen the learning curve, so you can focus on what you want to do vs. how to do it.