Still getting used to my new Space Place schedule,* but by god I'm having a great time. Got to play with the dome theater today--you know, the big motion-sick domes that can give you some great night sky tours. You can tour the solar system and get 3D From Space views of all the planets and moons and little space greebles and a few of the stars floating around out there, or you can do sky views from any of the aforementioned things. Or you can show their orbits. And while they default to real time, you can run them to any length of time. You can mark all the constellations and then charge hundreds of thousands of years into the future till they've scrambled into unrecognizable scribbles, or you can head out to Rigel and render them unrecognizable thataway.** Or you can stand on Mars and watch Phobos and Deimos do their weird little zigzag, or watch Jupiter change phases from Europa.
And then I found a bug.
I wanted to see how the Earth looked from Tranquility Base, and how its phases might change over the course of the month. SO I set up the simulation, cranked the digital dial, and--
--the Earth started moving.
Not, like, the wiggly changes you'd expect. Darn thing was cruising from horizon to horizon. I don't know how much you nerds know about tide-locking, but, uh, it's not supposed to do that. It's supposed to hang in the sky and change phases. We have whole lessons devoted to how the Moon faces the Earth, dangit. And now I'd gone and broken the moon.
Naturally, as this was like Day 3 of me using the dome, I figured this was a user error. SO I asked The Boss about it, and he did everything right, and--god dammit, the Earth was still moving.
It took us a while to figure out why. Finally we realized that the dial we were using to speed up time also moved us around on the surface of the Moon. The other dials, like the daily one I used when watching Mars's moons or Jupiter's phases, leave you in one place, but the yearly one sends the viewer's location just zooming all over the place.
"I think you found a bug!" The Boss said. "I'll talk to the computer guy about this!"
"I HOPE it's a bug," I said. "I really don't want to have broken it."
Really, though, I'm sort of stupidly pleased that knowing a bit about astronomy actually made me savvy to the problem. Plus, we managed to finagle a way around it so I still got to see the Earth phases. And now it's Somebody Else's Problem, so I'm left with nothing but smugness. Good times.
*For example, I keep forgetting when it's Tuesday, so my
torn_world updates have suffered. Sorry, Ellen!
**An experience that holds sentimental value for me after reading all those sci-fi books where the seasoned space captains lament that they're so far from Earth they don't even have constellations anymore.