abadideaI thought a guy was trying to draw me into conversation with a cutesy ice breaker to flirt with me — “how far away do you think the sun is?” — but he really did just tell me how many kilometers away the sun is and left. I have been visited by the Autistic Special Interest Fairy
as a large fashion model,@0xabad1dea I know that one! It's one astronomical unit
Marcus Müller@dngrs @0xabad1dea is it really right now the average distance? That'd be cool.
Dean, Steven
CuriousMatter@funkylab @dngrs @0xabad1dea https://theskylive.com/how-far-is-sun says it is currently 1.004842AU. But I think you're generally correct to say "1AU", because it's pretty circular, and if you don't go slapping any decimals on there, you're close enough!
Thomas Lobig🐔🐔@dngrs while true, totally a cop out @0xabad1dea
Sarah Sammis@dngrs @0xabad1dea here for that response.
yeah i got haters: Heyduz This Shirt Make My Boobs Look Fat
rezmason@kirakira @0xabad1dea Yeah! make a wish!
0xC0DEC0DE07E9@0xabad1dea there’s a site that tells you that with daily updates (because elliptical orbit):
https://theskylive.com/how-far-is-sun
https://theskylive.com/how-far-is-sun
OLD Bhawthorne account@c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea OMG, that is a site I did not know that I needed, but apparently I really do! Except now, I want to make my own with updates every second.
Yes, #ActuallyAutistic and in love with Sol and all her retinue.
Yes, #ActuallyAutistic and in love with Sol and all her retinue.
@bhawthorne @0xabad1dea yeah, now I’m all, “how hard is this to figure out? Apogee, perigee, figure out when those happen - wait, isn’t our orbit processing some way that would change those dates over geologic (astronomic?) time?”
@c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea I’m sure this guy could help us out:
Dataline@bhawthorne @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea Okay, here's some bait to make your day: It would be fun to do one that accounts for the rotation of the Earth, your geolocation, and the terrain height at the given coordinates, thereby truly answering the question "how far am I, personally, from the sun" with up to the minute calculations.
@somebody @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea Ah, but then you also need a 3D reconstruction of the solar surface from the space weather satellites, as those changes will dwarf piddling little things like elevation or altitude above earth’s mean sea level.
@somebody @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea I just learned that with the combination of millisecond pulsars and gravity wave background signals, researchers have been able to refine the location of the solar system barycenter to a point just outside the surface of the Sun (with a precision of about 100 meters). Thanks, Jupiter!
@somebody @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea No idea why the preview is for a captcha. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab7b67
Ted Mielczarek@c0dec0dec0de @bhawthorne @0xabad1dea it's interesting that you're thinking about the difficulty at the long scale, where I'm thinking about the short scale. If you want the site to update every second, the problem is that your clocks are not accurate enough!
@tedmielczarek @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea Oh, my clocks are frequently synchronized with a stratum 1 ntp time server which is within microseconds of the stratum 0 reference clocks. My clocks are within one second (probably within milliseconds) of the reference.
@bhawthorne @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea OK maybe *your* clocks are accurate enough, but I don't believe this holds for computers in general. 🙂
@tedmielczarek @c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea When I ran various flavors of Unix back in the mid-1980s to 1990s, once the NTP protocol was established, every computer running Unix was sync’ed similiarly. As they are Unix-based operating systems, it holds for anyone with an Internet-connected iOS or MacOS device. Every Linux device should be as well. Oh, and every mobile phone is synchronized as well.
So what does that leave? A bunch of PCs running Windows.
In other words, it does hold for computers in general, with the rather large exception being the mess of things running Microsoft’s operating systems. Not that those don’t also support NTP, but they are rarely configured correctly, and the cheap clock chips used in commodity PCs drift notoriously.
Willem Janssen@c0dec0dec0de @bhawthorne @0xabad1dea Naah, only Mercury does that orbital ellipsis rotaty thingy due to general relativity. Right? [one wiki rabbit hole later…] Woah, Earth’s perigee…eh…sol rotates over 112,000 years! That’s nothing in astronomical/geological scales!
(Mercury’s apsidal precession is *different* due to relativity, not present at all as I thought.)
Bodhipaksa@c0dec0dec0de @0xabad1dea The page for the moon is interesting, because you can see the distance changing in real time. I'd imagine the sun's page updates in the same way, but the distance is just slower to change.
silhouette@0xabad1dea omg me
Ryan Finnie@0xabad1dea I once had someone run up to me on the street and ask if datacenters ever need to ADD humidity.
(Okay, it was actually a friend who I was visiting with some other friends, and he was writing a book.)
((Answer: Yes, datacenters usually target about 20% RH, and deserts can certainly be below that. I'm not sure raising it is actually for static management, and suspect it's mostly for human comfort.))
Stryder Notavi@foo @0xabad1dea TIL.
I would have assumed they would want humidity as low as they could get it, and I would have been wrong.
cλémentd@0xabad1dea This guy is an absolute (astronomical) unit.
xrvs@0xabad1dea it’s about 8 light minutes so about 144±9 gigametres 🤓
btw this reminds me of a website that i once saw from vsauce that has solar system to scale and you have to scroll really really long to go from one planet to another
noplasticshower@0xabad1dea it's 1. The sun is 1 away.
TAL@0xabad1dea right now, or on average?
poleguy looking for lost tools
Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™@0xabad1dea so, how far *is* it
dzamie
John Maxwell@0xabad1dea And it's the contagious kind. Aaaargh!
Kailas Idavanmuzhi@0xabad1dea thats me lol 😆
@saliaku okay your profile picture is similar enough to the guy I saw today that I have to ask if you're being literal that it was literally you
@0xabad1dea Do you know how much time it takes for light to travel from the earth to the moon ?
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse@0xabad1dea 1 AU, do I get a prize? ;-)
ity [unit X-69]@0xabad1dea at the current time of writing the message? On average ?
rexisecret test; a science-titillation measurement.
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@0xabad1dea my wife would knowingly respond with the 1AU quantity in km and the exact orbital maxima and minima because she is awesome (I can't remember the numbers to save my life)
Andrew Zonenberg@gsuberland @0xabad1dea i would if i could. I just remembered 93 million miles give or take a percent or so
@azonenberg @0xabad1dea she's a fourth year planetary sciences student so very much her bag ^^
@gsuberland @0xabad1dea It’s ~8 light minutes, and light speed is ~300k km/s. That’s easy-ish to remember and good enough for me.
(Light speed is *exactly* 299,792,458 m/s, which is neat to memorize as a party trick (if you go to the right parties), but overkill for precision.)
@Wlm @0xabad1dea my party trick is remembering that it's 186282 miles per second
Alopece@0xabad1dea Ok....and now you're just going to keep that interesting fact to yourself?
sheislaurence@0xabad1dea interestingly, 1% of comments from the #Fediverse picked up on the fascinating social aspect of the anecdote, while 99% hyperfixated on the astronomical accuracy. i'll extrapolate from this anecdotal evidence what the demographic makeup of the Fediverse might be (not even mentioning the spectrumeter of infosec/devs peeps which I can observe in my daily working life).
Codey McCodeface@sheislaurence @0xabad1dea In other words, if that was a fediverse party there'd be a conga line behind that guy all waiting their turn to answer in their favorite units.
Kelvin n0mql EN35ld@0xabad1dea
Holy cats, that’s my late uncle David.
Fond memories of his occasional visits (he lived 5hrs North, where mom’s family grew up). Sometimes mom would send him and me off to Har Mar Mall just to get him out of her hair for a few hours. She had little patience for his ramblings about “How many gallons of water ya s’pose ya could fit in that big ol’ mall?” and such.
I was in my 20s when my folks surmised he was probably autistic.
I probably am too, I s’pose.
Fazal Majid@0xabad1dea off the top of my head I'd say 149 million km, which is good enough as the aphelion is 152e6 km and the perihelion 147e6 km. It's one of the basic numbers anyone should know, like the radius of the Earth is 6400 km (in fact the original definition of the meter was that the earth's meridians were 40,000 km).