Astronomy

[Soliton]

Prior to building it in my survival world I evaluated a version of (most famously) Stonehenge as a way to determine in-game time without using the clock on the character gui.  After a couple of days of playing with it in a creative world,  I was able to determine season, month, day, and even (very) rough time from the position of the Sun.  My sincere appreciation to the development team for giving us lots of tools to make this an interesting, while not onerous, task.  Not surprisingly, this same build works just as well regardless of your location, since making Suns motion relative to your location in the world would be computational intensive for a mechanic that no one would ever really use.

To my question, afterwards I wondered if the Moon's relative motion could be used as a way to gather additional information.  So far I haven't been able to discover a workable correlation and was curious if anyone else had researched this issue and found a exploitable relationship?

Thank you for any insight you can offer.

Respectfully Submitted,

 

[IronOre]

Astronomy is my scientific specialty!

The changing rise/set angle of the sun and movement along the horizon was one the the main reasons I was attracted to Vintage Story.

Needless to say, I conducted an in-depth astronomical analysis and confirmed the EXCELLENT behavior of the sun, but of course I was quite confused by the moon and stars.

I put up pillars to track the position of the sun on the horizon and to measure its height in the sky at midday.  I also used piles of stones in baskets to keep day counts as I arranged the windows such that the actual date was covered by the character equipment window so when I press C it never shows me the date or time.  I count out 4 divisions of the year from the equinox when the sun is setting due east/west through the winter solstice, the other equinox, and the summer solstice, and back to equinox again.  Lots of fun.

The moon was a bit messed up at the time, but has been greatly improved in the latest update.  The update notes stated the intention to get the star field rotating correctly as well, but it still has some major issues, but I'm confident it will get fixed eventually.  Then you could navigate by the stars as the celestial poles would be higher and lower on the horizon based on latitude.  I do kind of wish the star field wasn't so busy but had more recognizable patterns, not necessarily the real constellations but something cool that would stand out with very bright stars in addition to all the little stars.  These constellations could be might fit with the lore of the world!

[LadyWYT]

21 minutes ago, IronOre said:

I do kind of wish the star field wasn't so busy but had more recognizable patterns, not necessarily the real constellations but something cool that would stand out with very bright stars in addition to all the little stars.  These constellations could be might fit with the lore of the world!

Actually, real world constellations would fit perfectly with the lore. Without spoiling too much, the setting of Vintage Story is/was the real world late Middle Ages. Of course, due to some events, a few things have changed.

[IronOre]

Ah, I see. Well in that case I'd love it since I am quite familiar with the constellations as seen from Earth.  I'd be able to read the sky like a map!  Perhaps in all the cataclysmic events the Earth was thrown from its orbit or sucked through a worm-hole and captured around a different sun.  It must have entered a retrograde orbit because with the new astronomy update the stars do progress through the seasons but in the opposite direction (but there still seems to be an issue with the star field tilting correctly according to latitude).  Maybe in its new orbit the Earth captured this smaller moon we see or the original moon came with it and moved further away (the actual moon appears roughly the same diameter as the sun in the sky).  At any rate the moon is now orbiting fully in the ecliptic plane so that we get eclipses more regularly in a way that doesn't quite match reality, but I'm going to determine if there is a regular pattern with the new update so I can track/predict eclipse occurrences.