Stephen <mca### [at] aolcom> wrote:

> You do ask awkward questions. ;-)

It's a talent I've honed through decades of constant practice.   ;)


> Best for what application? Remember when using compound gear chains the
> ratios are multiplied.
> This is mostly from memory. I only did mechanical engineering at high
> school and that was a long time ago. So that is what I meant about doing
> it on my fingers. One step/gear at a time. ;-)
> If I have not answered your question. Ask again.

I was sort of thinking along the lines of "given the gears available" - how
would one calculate which gear combination to use that would most accurately
reflect a given orbital period.  Likely just a novelty, so if Jupiter's 67th
moon is a day off once every year, then it's likely no one would know.
Hell, I didn't even know Jupiter had ***67 Moons*** until I took a look over at
http://www.windows2universe.org/our_solar_system/planets_table.html

:O

As for Scale, scale, scale ....   yeah.   I had been dabbling with doing a solar
eclipse scene, and it really drives home the concept of numbers being
"astronomical".  I did a quick edit to do a sort of top-down view of the
planetary orbits, and --- there definitely needed to be some scaling UP of the
planet sizes and scaling DOWN of the orbital radii, just so that there was shot
in Hell of seeing a point of light on the screen where a planet ought to be.

It _really_ gets one thinking about how the heck they actually see things that
"small", THAT far away and even have some notion about what the rest of the
galaxy looks like....

I've also disambiguated rotation and revolution.  :)

In my dabbling, I was wondering if the sun has a tilt to the plane of the solar
system, and
do any of the celestial objects have a secondary rotation - a wobble, if you
will, of their primary axis of rotation?
In POV-Ray terms, I guess that would be a rotate y, rotate z, and then a second
rotate y (looking top - down at the N pole).


.....and I'm back off to work.

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