I don't remember seeing this piece of information here, so here it is:

  If you have never heard of the asteroid 3753 Cruithne, you should definitely
see this.
  This asteroid is peculiar in that it has an extremely complicated orbit
around the Sun and the Earth. Although not a true satellite of Earth, it's
called "Earth's companion" because in a way it orbits "around" Earth
(although the orbit is quite complex).
  The Cruithne official homepage has lots of details about this:

http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html

  What makes this interesting is that the animations available in the page
demonstrating the orbit of the asteroid are rendered with POV-Ray.
  Specially this one is very descriptive (I didn't understand the orbit of
the asteroid until I saw this):

http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/mpegs/int1.mpg

  The other animations in the page are also interesting.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:3bec4ba6@news.povray.org...
>
>   If you have never heard of the asteroid 3753 Cruithne, you should
definitely
> see this.
>
> http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html
>
>   What makes this interesting is that the animations available in the page
> demonstrating the orbit of the asteroid are rendered with POV-Ray.
>
> http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/mpegs/int1.mpg

Hurrah! for the POV-Team.

I've often read of these things but hadn't seen animations of it until now.
Magazines never have animations.  Wonder if swarms of these things existed
long ago and are now less likely or if they are a more recent stabilized
phenomenon.  Kind of in the vein of a captured Moon theory versus the
divided Earth idea.

Bob H.

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