(no subject)

Someone, somewhere, must have a formula into which I can plug the following values:

* Radius of the planet
* Rotational Inclination of the planet to its orbit
* Major and Minor orbital radii, or average and eccentricity
* Longitude of a point on the planet
* A known Zero-time point for solar noon
* The known zero-point in the orbital path at the known zero-time point
* An arbitrary time to calculate for, in units since/until the zero point


And get back

* Current altitude of sun in the sky

I'm probably missing an input or two. Anyway, I want to be able to compute, with a reasonable degree of accuracy (eg, "looks right" as opposed to "can set clocks or navigte by it"), where the sun is in the sky for any point on the surface of any planet. In particular earth and mars, as I want to be able to 'accurately' change something to reflect current dawn/day/twilight/night illumination for, say seattle or lomonosov crater, without resorting to doing based on the hour of the day, which is horribly inaccurate from one end of the year to the other.

Twitter posts from 08 January

From my Twitter stream:

thu 08:52am	All the tweets i'm receiving seem to be "about 1 hour ago". i probably missed a message about Something Happening, didn't I?
thu 10:25am	@dreamingcrow: twitter's having delivery delays. My latest are 20-minutes old, so they're getting caught up
thu 10:47am	@dreamingcrow: well, delivery to the sender is easy. it's just mapping to everybody following you that's expensive.
thu 02:19pm	I'm apparently very uninteresting. I keep getting random people following me and then unfollowing a day or so later.
thu 02:19pm	*waves* to those who stick around.
thu 02:25pm	removing iphonemodem and pdanet from my phone. never got either to work, and don't really need them. I can roll my own if it comes to that.