On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 6:32 PM, David Scheidt <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Anthony Jackson <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 10/11/2011 5:34 AM, Captain Joy wrote: > > > >> No, but the angle a planet moves through given its current location > >> on the ellipse, semi major axis, delta-T, and eccentricity is an > >> equation that can be looked up. > > > > Actually, it isn't. There's no simple method of computing that, at least > > accurately when delta-T is a significant fraction of the orbital period. > > Sure there are. There's no closed form, but there are iterative > methods that will produce a result with arbitrary accuracy. There are > libraries to do that in just about any reasonable programing language > (and some unreasonable ones, like Common Lisp and javascript.) you > would care to write a program in. Modern computation makes many hard > problems easy with a little bit of brute force. (Though Maple did a > fine job solving Kepler's equation via Newton's method when I was in > college, so it's not a problem that really requires a whole lot of > computational brute force.) > I guess it depends on what you mean by "simple". So: what's the simplest iterative approach that you know of? > > > > -- > David Scheidt > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> > http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l > -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
