There are two comets moving towards the inner Solar System right now, and both of them may be bright during 2013. I know that by then we all plan to be using the new 5 GHz quad-core ARMv8 phones Jolla has promised, but in case they get delayed in the mail, I have modified the orrery program to show the positions of the comets, along with other information.
Note that the comets will not be plotted unless you enable that feature via the Displayed Items menu page. There's no need to enable their plotting right now - both comets are still very faint.
The orbits of the comets are shown on the To-Scale Solar System page.
The first of the two comets is Pan-STARRS (C2011L4) which may get to magnitude -1 (nearly as bright at the brightest star in the sky, aside from the Sun) next March. But the real show may be put on by comet ISON (C2012S1) late November 2013. It's a sungrazing comet, and might become as bright as the full moon. Comet brightness forecasts are just guesses though, so it's always possible that these comets will fizzle out instead of dazzling us. But we've got two shots next year.
The orrery can show the position of the comets on the sky display, along with the Planet Compass, the Planet Elevations page, and of course the new Comets page.
I've uploaded the code to the Extras Testing repository. If you like this little app, please consider voting for it at http://maemo.org/packages/package_in...rrery/3.8.0-1/ so that it can be promoted to the high-class Extras Repository.
@Ken-Young
Thank you very much for still keeping supporting this "little smart-***" tool!
Just one remark/beg. Cold you please post also in your announce thread (just a link to new thread) about these new features? This would make it easier (at least for me, it is quite hard to keep in touch when a new update is coming via extras-devel notification ).
I'm ashamed to admit I have an N950 that I have done virtually nothing with. If the Jolla phone looks decent, then I hope to do an orrery port that will work for that phone and the N9(50). It'll be a big job, because the code is in need of a major refactoring. I'll probably rewrite the whole thing in C++ and Qt. If the Jolla announcement is promising, I'll try to get most of the work done during my Christmas vacation.
Yes, but we all die this December, at the end of 2012, before these comets ever get close. That's why I didn't wait until the comets were brighter before pushing out this release.
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