logoalt Hacker News

TeMPOraLtoday at 8:55 AM1 replyview on HN

If all you care about is measurements/predictions relative to Earth, then it makes no sense to transform everything into Sol-centric frame, do the math there, and then untransform results back to Earth-centric frame.

Put another way, there's a reason we use latitude/longitude for terrestrial positioning, instead of Cartesian coordinates with Sol being at (0, 0, 0). For one, it keeps the math time-invariant.


Replies

Dylan16807today at 7:41 PM

You can do math from any position. If you're on a train you'll do a lot of calculations relative to your train. That doesn't mean things are actually orbiting your train. You would never declare to all of humanity that your train is the 'center' of everything.