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WorldWideTelescope / wwt-web-client

The WorldWide Telescope web client lets you explore the universe in your browser.
https://worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/
MIT License
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Add Ceres as a solar system object #320

Open forceflow1049 opened 4 years ago

forceflow1049 commented 4 years ago

Now that we have high-res imagery, it would be great to add Ceres as a destination in solar system mode. It's almost a perfect sphere, so it shouldn't cause problems there. And, as the largest object in the asteroid belt, it's quite noteworthy.

pkgw commented 4 years ago

This would be nice to have, although the technical implementation isn't always as straightforward as you'd hope. Do you know anything about the calculations of Ceres' ephemeris?

Overall our engineering bandwidth is pretty limited, so it's hard to give an estimate as to when we might be able to take a look at this. Feel free to ping here for updates.

forceflow1049 commented 4 years ago

I definitely understand that things can be more difficult under the hood than it appears on the outside! I’m not sure what information you would need exactly, but the Ceres ephemeris is really well defined (helps that observations date to 1801!). Here are the orbital elements with their uncertainties and covariances, as well as a tool to generate an ephemeris in many different coordinate systems: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=1&orb=1

I assume these calculations are based on the standard SPICE kernels.