Welcome to the dumpster fire of a year in review!
Gulf Wars: CANCELLED! Lilies War: CANCELLED! Pennsic: CANCELLED!
Plague for everyone!
Well, I guess I didn’t need to spend any time working on new garb, fixing my armor, or many other things. So while this year has been dismal in many respects, it was a pretty good year for my project.
At the start of the year I was 22.97% of the way. At the end, $35.78$%. So I made it through $12.81$% which is a fair bit up from the previous two years1.
Whereas last year I didn’t really have a handle on whether or not the difficulty was increasing, this year I definitely think it has. At the beginning of the year, we’d just started into Book IV which was our first lunar model and it wasn’t too bad. However, the second lunar model really gets more complicated and I found myself having to review older posts to remember things as well as edit them when I realized there were points that needed more emphasis or even correction!
Oddly, despite the jump in difficulty, the only long pause I had where I was fundamentally stuck on something was between January and May when grappling with IV.2 which was only dealing with the first lunar model. So the second model, while more complicated, didn’t end up stalling me nearly as much.
That’s not to say there weren’t some other long pauses. In particular, there was no progress for most of June and July. But this wasn’t due to being stuck. Rather, this was due to working up my entry for this year’s Kingdom Arts & Science competition2. This relates to one of the Big Goals of this project which is to reproduce these period techniques on modern data to complete mathematical models that work for modern times. This was only a model for the sun as I’m still working on completing the chapters on the lunar model so that will be a future entry.
This one however, required me to really recap the entirety of Book IV as the project essentially performed the calculations of this entire book. Given that the lunar model will be two books worth of data, let’s say I’m not overly enthused about getting to that, but I’m sure I will3.
Since then, I’ve been on a serious binge and the rate of progress has increased significantly.
Turning away from the Almagest, there has also been some serious progress on the observational component of the project. This is despite a very slow start to the year in which I didn’t have my first observing session until nearly the end of April due to poor weather during good moon phases.
A good deal of the improvement came from two enhancements to the quadrant. The first was the addition of an azimuth ring. This freed me from being limited to objects on the meridian which has a few significant impacts. First, there’s no waiting. I can swing around to any star visible, which speeds things up massively. Second, one problem with the quadrant is that anything above $~75º$ altitude becomes extremely difficult to observe due to having to lean over the base in ways that are, at best, not comfortable and, at worst, not possible. Since I’m freed from the meridian, I can wait for these objects as they’re closer to the horizon, allowing for much more of the sky to be mapped.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work out well initially as there was a large systematic error due to the the ring not being properly centered and I ended up tossing two entire nights of data. Frustrating, but the data was actually what helped me diagnose the issue and by the next month, had one of my best nights of data yet.
The second enhancement was the addition of a pair of small “wings” behind the quadrant arc. This has removed the need for an assistant to come with me on observing trips as I can now line up a star, hold the quadrant in position, and clamp it so I’m free to step down and take the reading myself. This allowed for me to go out and observe far more nights than I would have been able to otherwise.
In addition, I’ve started visiting a fantastic new site for observing: Danville Conservation Area. This site is halfway between St. Louis and Columbia and is about an hour and a half drive each way for me, so I don’t use it unless I plan on having a long night of observing, but the light pollution is quite low allowing us to observe stars that would never have been possible to most of the other sites I’ve use.
Aside from just the progress made on the project, going to Danville resulted in meeting Will Day, an astrophotographer who was interested in the project and was willing to do a photoshoot with us there that was fully period. The result was easily the coolest pictures I’ve ever had of myself.
But as with the high, so come the lows as heading out on another observing run resulted in a car accident that, while not resulting in any injuries, was rather expensive.
Still, the star catalog continues to grow and as the year ends, it contains data for $360$ stars. In addition, I was able to get the crucial observation of Mars at opposition.
Also, I’ve made a significant improvement to the data processing. Previously, data was collected into a custom Java based web interface I’d written that connected to a SQL database. However, that database was on my local machine so it was only usable on my desktop. That has now been replaced with a Google sheet that does all the math, plus allows me to keep a separate table with the true right ascension and declination that it then looks objects up in to automatically calculate the error. This has the advantage of being accessible anywhere I have internet.
Without events, I didn’t do much in the way of putting together new classes. However, for Calontir’s Collegium, I did teach my class on the Movement of the Heavens, as well as my Christianity and Astronomy class which got a major update nearly doubling the amount of content as I found some new sources this year.
So overall, this year has ended up being really good for my project with lots of improvements the observing and solid progress on the Almagest. So goals for the next year? At this point the quadrant is $2 \frac{1}{2}$ years old and I’m thinking it may be time to either rebuild it, or perhaps design a new instrument. There’s been a few from Brahe’s Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica that I’ve been considering. Plus we’ve also recently seen the triquetrum which feels like something that could pack up much better for wars than the giant quadrant. We’ll have to see what I can put together.
Once we can start having events again, I’d really like to teach my beginning classes at some larger events and it may be time to start getting into putting together some of the more mathematical astronomy classes. I’ve also been wanting to turn the current classes I mention above into YouTube videos although I fear the time sink that may result in.
But here’s hoping that $2021$ is better than this year4.