Turn Earth by the Earth Rotation Angle, so its lit face stays Horizons' at AD 1 as it is today

Earth was turned by its IAU W, taken at the clock's UT plus today's 69.184 s. That W is a straight
line fitted to the present: 360.9856235 degrees a day, which, once its pole's -0.641 degrees a
century in right ascension is counted, runs 6.3e-6 degrees a day slow of Earth's real turning. The
followsUt comment said the clock's date "already says how far it has turned"; it did not. Against
Horizons (observer quantity 14 from the Sun, TIME_TYPE=UT, Earth one light-time back) the drawn
sub-solar point was 2.3 degrees off at AD 1000 and 4.5 at AD 1.

Earth is now turned by the IERS Earth Rotation Angle (IERS Conventions 2010, eq. 5.15) at the
clock's date, counted from the node the IAU's W starts at, 90 degrees past the pole's right
ascension. The pole is unchanged. Drawn minus Horizons, in degrees:

  date                       before    after
  2025-06-01 12:00 (unit)     +0.06   -0.003
  AD 1000, JD 2086455 (unit)  -2.3    -0.001
  AD 1, JD 1721600 (unit)     -4.5    +0.051
  live app, :4301, same probe as the review's
    JD 2460900.25             +0.089   +0.005
    JD 2086300.5              -2.281   +0.010
    JD 1800000                -4.049   +0.056
    JD 1721450.75             -4.530   +0.072

At noon UTC on 1 June 2025 the Sun now stands over 0.52 W on the drawn sphere, where the equation
of time puts it at 0.53 W (0.43 W before).

TT_MINUS_UTC_DAYS had no other use and is removed; its comment also counted 37 leap seconds where
UTC has taken 27 on top of the 10 s it started from in 1972.

Tests: body-orientation.spec 'lights Earth's face where Horizons does at the far end of the clock
too: AD 1000 and AD 1' (within 0.15 degrees), and the renderer's AD 1000 Earth test now checks the
drawn face against Horizons instead of against the IAU W the old code used. Control: turning Earth
by its IAU W at UT + 69.184 s again fails both named tests (2 failed, 834 passed). The README says
which model turns Earth.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-29 21:09:54 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5
parent dc7277f740
commit cbe4908219
5 changed files with 30 additions and 21 deletions
+3 -2
View File
@@ -55,7 +55,8 @@ in it is measured and what is not.
**System view** — selecting a star flies the camera continuously into its system rather than
cutting to a new scene. The Sun gets the real solar-system bodies, moving on JPL's mean orbital
elements — Standish's for the planets, JPL SSD's satellite table for the moons, the Small-Body
Database for Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake — and turned by the IAU's rotational elements; other
Database for Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake — and turned by the IAU's rotational elements, Earth
by the IERS Earth Rotation Angle; other
stars get their confirmed exoplanets. Orbits are drawn as ellipses and bodies are propagated
along them by a Kepler solver to the date on the map's clock. Under them, a dashed grid marks out
round distances in AU — 5 AU rings for the solar system, 0.01 AU rings for TRAPPIST-1 — with a
@@ -329,7 +330,7 @@ plugin's own files are kept so it can be listed from a marketplace of its own la
## Data credits
Star catalogue: [HYG database](https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database) (Hipparcos, Yale
Bright Star, Gliese) — 68 388 stars within 250 pc. Solar-system orbits: JPL approximate planetary mean elements (Standish), JPL SSD satellite mean elements and the JPL Small-Body Database; rotation: the IAU WGCCRE 2015 report via NAIF's pck00011; physical data, and the positions the orbits are checked against: NASA/JPL Horizons. Exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet
Bright Star, Gliese) — 68 388 stars within 250 pc. Solar-system orbits: JPL approximate planetary mean elements (Standish), JPL SSD satellite mean elements and the JPL Small-Body Database; rotation: the IAU WGCCRE 2015 report via NAIF's pck00011, and for Earth the IERS Conventions 2010; physical data, and the positions the orbits are checked against: NASA/JPL Horizons. Exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet
Archive. Deep-sky objects: [OpenNGC](https://github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC). Body and skybox
imagery: NASA/JPL/USGS public domain and Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0) — per-file provenance
is recorded in `src/assets/textures/README.md`.