SDO Partial Solar Eclipse December 6, 2010 Redux
414 views · Published 10 December 2010 · 0:50 · Indexed 23 October 2026
Channel: Astronomy Live · 2010 · Science & Technology
Same as the last video, I imported SDO's orbital elements into Celestia and then recorded the sunward view on December 6, 2010. Sure enough the moon was what passed in front of the sun. I re-recorded it while having Celestia track the moon's motion in the sky while following SDO in orbit so that the video would be much smoother and you could see the ecliptic grid markings much more clearly. Those markings show that the observed upward motion of the moon was consistent with what should have been seen due to SDO's orbit around the earth. To see for yourself, just paste the following orbital elements into celestia's solarsys.ssc file below the entry for earth:
"SDO:Earth I" "Sol/Earth" {
Class "spacecraft"
# Mesh
Radius 0.005
EllipticalOrbit {
Epoch 2455536.02043152
Period 0.99727900
SemiMajorAxis 42164.391
Eccentricity 0.0002434
Inclination 27.9524
AscendingNode 184.3762
ArgOfPericenter 323.7533
MeanAnomaly 11.6594
}
Obliquity 27.9524
EquatorAscendingNode 184.3762
RotationOffset 118.5570
# Orientation [ ]
}
