The TYCHOSIUM 3D simulator

Hi!

I’m currently working on the new Tychosium version and any opinions/ideas are appreciated. The first big job is to move all the existing code and functionality into the new framework/codebase and when that’s done it will be easier to build new features.

Some new things that will be implemented:

  • Planet camera - The ability to view the model from an Eartly view or from any planet.

  • Clickable objects - The ability to get information like Right Ascension and Declination for any celestial object by simply click or hover on it.

  • Nicer graphics and shadows so that Solar and Lunar eclipses can be shown.

All the best /Patrik

THE TYCHOSIUM 3D simulator: https://ts.tychos.space/

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Hi Patrik, thanks for the forum.

I went today on the online tychosium simulator and noticed the option to accelerate/decelerate a given time period was no longer available. I was wondering why, since I felt it gave much more control over planetary motions.

Hi Greg, we thought it was confusing and a bit overkill to have both the speed setting “One second equals” and the multiplier/backwards slider, so I replaced it with a reverse direction checkbox. This allows you to do about the same thing as with the slider.

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Hi Patrik, I personally thought the slider was one of the most useful tools of the simulator, and taking it out appears to diminish the user’s control.

If you were to work out the long term precession motion, you could accelerate up to 1 second = 4000 years. That’s no longer possible: eliminating the slider option has decreased the capacities of the simulator.

For each time period, you could change the speed by multiples between -4 to +4.

For example, for 1 second = 1 week, you could change the time speed to:

-4 weeks
-3,5 weeks
-3 weeks
[…]
0 (no motion)
[…]
+3 weeks
+3,5 weeks
+4 weeks

a total of: 16 different speeds for each time period, without counting the zero multiple. That’s a serious loss in terms of the simulator’s capacities.

In terms of interface use, I now have to click on run and 1 week, then click again on 1 month, etc. It feels as if overall control of the simulator motions is lost without the slider. It makes the runs more mechanical, more stop-motion instead of dynamic and interactive. The slider allowed the user to go back and forth around a point by clicking and dragging, while observing and focusing on the planetary motions on the screen. Now I have to click and focus on the tool bar every time and I feel that makes me lose focus. It interrupts the flow of experimenting.

I feel that’s a loss to the amazing quality of the simulator you designed.

edit: for clarity and further development

Dear Patrik, the other day I was actually thinking to ask you to reinstate the slider… As it is, I am also ‘missing it’ !:slightly_smiling_face:

Dear Greg, thanks for your welcome input and advice. In fact, I am probably to blame for the removal of the slider, since I often tend to ask Patrik to ‘keep the Tychosium’s controls simple and unclogged’ - but in this case removing the slider was, I agree, a bad idea.

Simon

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Dear Greg. Thank you so much for the feedback.The first thing I will do when I get working on Tychosium next week is to reinstate the fabulous slider :slight_smile:

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I’ve now reimplemented the slider, named it “Speed multiplier” and given it a range of -5 to 5

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Hello Patrik,

I was delighted to see the demonstration of the coming version of the Tychosium in the Grimerica podcast. Very nice work! Some reflections:

  • Consider using a picture-in-picture approach for the planet camera. As a user, I’d like to be able to move this floating window while keeping the outer-space perspective in the background. Perhaps even multiple such views from different planets/viewports?
  • Consider adding some camera/viewport presets for quick positioning of certain perspectives, e.g. the Earth-Polestar perspective. Maybe even allow the users to store their own perspectives.
  • During the podcast, you mentioned that you’d like to add shadows for the rendering of eclipses, but that the visual representation of planets and such makes it problematic. It may be possible to use a ”ghost core”, i.e. visually hidden object, of correct dimension just for the rendering of the shadows, while making the visible objects transparent in the rendering process. Just a thought.
  • Consider adding a calendar with important events, e.g. conjunctions, eclipses etc, that users could click on to set the time. This would facilitate any review that users as likely to conduct and it will help to demonstrate the many unfamiliar observations stated in the book, such as the supposed ‘non-periodic’ comets. As a user I’d like to be able to browse through a calendar and click on known events for a simple and quick visual presentation of such events.

Keep up the good work!
/Per

Thank you Per. Excellent suggestions. Often when developing you tend to not think enough ‘outside the box’ which can lead to tideous and unpractical solutions, so input like this is very helpful. As for the planet view, my ambition is to make it generic, so that any planet, not just Earth can be visited.

And split screen is something I will implement as well. It’s important to demonstrate that this model work both from a geocentric viewpoint and a birdseye view. Something a heliocentric model is not capable of without cheating geometrically.

And your thinking of having “ghost objects” is very interesting. I was thinking of doing some kind of scaling on the fly but it’s probably much easier to just have a prebuilt model in correct scale that becomes visible from a planet perspective and that’s used to calculate eclipse shadows. Will look into it.

I’m currently working on a new trace function and the ambition is to make it possible to hover the trails and see a date/time stamp with RA and Dec for the individual points that makes up the trails.

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I would like to inquire about the ‘view from Earth’ option. I seem to recall Patrix saying something about this feature in an interview.
It would be helpful if the Tychosium could duplicate retrograde of Mars as seen from Earth, and against the correct background of stars.

Hi Peaker. An Earth centric view will be included in the new version of Tychosium that I’m working on. However work been a bit slow because of other engagements. But as anyone who examines the Tychos seriously discover, this is the first model that actually works geometrically and the Tychosium demonstrates this fact. An Earth centric view a very useful visual aid of course however this fact remains without it.

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Dear Peaker,

As Patrik wrote, the ‘view from Earth’ is in the works - and I’m looking forward to it myself, as this option will truly make the Tychosium simulator unique in its kind: to be able to toggle seamlessly between a ‘view from Earth’ to a ‘birdseye view’ of our Solar System is not something that can be done in any heliocentric simulator - simply because the configuration of the Copernican model is geometrically impossible (and will therefore, periodically, show absurd ‘alignments’ between our planets and the background stars). Mars, for instance, couldn’t possibly return in front of a same given star at both ends of a 546-day time window (which, in fact, it can be empirically observed to do!). For instance:

On 2018-11-05, Mars was seen conjuncting at RA 21h47min with the star Deneb Algedi. The Tychosium (which already includes a number of stars) can show that this was in fact the case:


On 2020-05-04 (i.e. 546 days later) Mars was again seen conjuncting at RA 21h47min with Deneb Algedi:

As for the Mars retrograde motions, the Tychosium can - in fact - already give you an idea of how the ‘view from Earth’ (once it gets implemented) will correctly trace these empirically-observed events. For instance:

This is a ‘timelapse sequence’ of Mars’s 2018 retrograde trajectory (courtesy of astrophotographer Tunc Tezel). As you can see, Mars was observed to retrograde in our skies just around the ‘borderline’ between Capricornus and Sagittarius. On that occasion, Mars was also observed to descend in our skies by about 5° of DECL, between Mid-June and Mid-August:


Well, here’s how the Tychosium can currently depict / re-enact that particular 2018 event:

You may thus appreciate why I am confident that the Tychosium will eventually become not only the best simulator of our Solar System’s motions ever devised - but in fact, the ONLY simulator that correctly does so! :slight_smile:

I recently looked at Randal Carlsons podcast Kosmographia where he tried to address some of the questions that your book so elegantly explain. One of the things they talked about was the possibility that our earths polar shift event could have to do with our earth crossing the plane of the suns from positive to negative or vice verse. But that the earths path in space could then look like a sine wave and this imply that there is a second mass like a binary thing going on.
Well I immediately though of your book.

Take a look at their discussion!

Well, thank you for the quick response!

I am trying to convince my two intelligent friends(only two, I’m afraid) about the veracity of The Tychos. This is what is behind my request.

I see this as two step operation: One, show that Mars has an irregular orbit because a retrograde seems to be missing every eight or so years. Two, explain that the current definition for retrograde motion is hopelessly flawed and, in fact, an embarrassment to astronomy.

You mentioned Tunc Tezel. I emailed him again recently and he replied promptly to say that his photos went currently for sale. He was brief. I am amazed at these time-lapse photos of his because they seem to show the loop in 3-D simply by Mars starting the loop quite small and then growing in size before shrinking again at the conclusion of the loop. Now, according to the ‘official theory’, this should not be apparent. True?

I meant to say …“currently not for sale…”

Mikael, I got to ‘precessional wobble’ and hit Pause.

Now I’m replying to you before I proceed with Randall C to ask if you’re taking him seriously.

Yes, the heliocentric explanation of Mars retrograde is flawed and also falsified by several observations -
Mars could not be in conjunction with the stars it observably is, with this explanation.
Judging from it’s angular size, Mars is moving towards us in its retrograde, this is also consistent with the parallax Mars display visavi the stars during its retrograde.
And “the nail in the coffin” - The intervals between Mars retrogrades are in fact irregular.

And as we can already observe in Tychosium, these observations are however consistent with the Tychos model. But the upcoming geocentric view will demonstrate this even more clearly.

Well, this is all good. This is at the core of the model because it is the aspect that is accessible to the layman. The fact that we observe the retrograde in slow motion, without visual aid, from a standing position of our choosing.

'Mars could not be in conjunction with the stars it observably does with the standard explanation"… this is what I suspected and it has gone unchecked simply because standard stellariums can’t place those stars in their correct positions. True?

And here you mention angular size, it’s changing in Tezel’s time-lapse… also true? That’s how it appears to me as a casual observer, but shouldn’t this fact alone have brought the whole house of cards that is modern astronomy down??

And, your last point… that the retrogrades are irregular in their timing, is that what you mean? Whilst in the heliocentric stellarium I would observe Earth and Mars overtaking at regular intervals? Or, at least, more regularly than the retrogrades occur? This point could be clarified.

Thanks,

Caution, there be dragons dear Peaker :slight_smile:

Stellariums like Stellarium is in accordance with actual observations and this is testimony that they actually don’t use true Newtonian/heliocentric mechanics in their engine, since that would produce the problems Simon demonstrates in his book. And this is also why it is not possible to get a birdseye view in Stellarium. And conversely it is not possible to have any accurate stars or a geocentric view in a heliocentric simulator like Jsorrery since the planets can then be shown to not conjunct with the stars they observably do.

So don’t make the mistake and say to your sceptical friends “this will look incorrect in Stellarium”, because it won’t. It’s just that it doesn’t use heliocentric motion.

Tychosium will be the first Solar System simulator where you can seamlessly transfer between a birdseye view of the Solar system and a geocentric one.

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Dear Peaker,

I much appreciate your questions - as they give me an opportunity (and renewed inspiration) to further illustrate why the Copernican model is geometrically impossible. As Patrik rightly says though, when it comes to (for instance) the retrograde motions of Mars, you need to be extra careful as to what arguments to put forth to your (I assume) “Copernican-minded” friends. For example, the argument that the angular size of Mars is observed to increase at the ‘peak’ of Mars’s retrograde periods is rather weak: this, because Copernicans will tell you that, as Earth passes closest to Mars (as it ‘overtakes Mars on its inside lane’), Mars’s angular size will naturally increase.

At the end of Chapter 5 of my book I thoroughly expound and illustrate just why the observed retrograde periods of Mars would be absurd (i.e. physically & optically impossible) under the heliocentric model. However, I’m happy to provide even more evidence to this fact - and what follows should definitively settle the matter.

I shall use once more a timelapse sequence by the famed astrophotographer Tunc Tezel to make my case: namely, his depiction of the 2012 retrograde motions of Mars. I think we can safely assume that Mr. Tezel is a trustworthy professional - and that what he depicted was exactly what was actually / empirically observed from Earth. So, first of all, let’s see how this 2012 event (and Mars’s observed ‘looping’ trajectory) was depicted by Mr. Tezel - and how it compares with the path traced by the Tychosium simulator:

The Tychosium, it seems, does a pretty good job at re-enacting Tunc Tezel’s timelapse sequence :slight_smile:
The fact that Tezel’s image sequence is inclined by about 24° is simply due to the Earth’s axial tilt.

As you can see, I have chosen two dates (“A” and “B”) when Mars was observed to transit at almost the same longitude (RA) in our skies.

A” occurred on 2012-03-08 ---------- and “B” occurred on 2012-05-27.

Note that “B” is slightly to the left of “A” - by a mere whisker though : Mars was at pretty much the same longitude on both dates - and was facing almost the same stars on both occasions. Now, let’s see how the Tychosium depicts these two Mars passages:


Indeed, the Tychosium confirms that the “B” position of Mars would have been very slightly to the left of its “A” position (as viewed from Earth) - and thus, Mars would have been facing roughly the same stars.

Next, let’s see how a heliocentric simulator (“The SKY LIVE”) depicts the “A” and “B” positions:


I trust that the absurdities implied by the above depiciton (by The SKY LIVE simulator) will be immediately obvious and crystal clear - to any person gifted with some basic sense of spatial perspective. However, let me highlight and underline these absurdities - for those who may have problems envisioning this whole affair:

  • Firstly, Earth is assumed - by the Copernicans - to move around its (supposed) orbit around the Sun at a considerably higher speed than Mars (107226 km/h versus 86652 km/h - or about 20% faster!).

  • Secondly, Earth’s orbit is obviously assumed to be SMALLER than the orbit of Mars.

  • YET, and in spite of the two above assumptions, the “SKY LIVE” simulator shows that the “A” and “B” vectors are DIVERGING by more than 3°! In other words, they cannot POSSIBLY be reconciled with Tunc Tezel’s timelapse sequence of Mars’s empirically-observed 2012 retrograde motion.

In conclusion, the “A” and “B” positons of Mars (as photographed by Tunc Tezel) are perfectly consistent with the TYCHOS model - and utterly impossible within the Copernican model.