Last week I stood outside my apartment and watched Tiangong fly across the sky[0]. What an incredible time to be alive.
The ISS, which has five times more modules, reaches magnitude -4 sometimes. Third brightest thing in sky.
> The scale used to indicate magnitude originates in the Hellenistic practice of dividing stars visible to the naked eye into six magnitudes. The brightest stars in the night sky were said to be of first magnitude (m = 1), whereas the faintest were of sixth magnitude (m = 6) [...]
> In 1856, Norman Robert Pogson formalized the system by defining a first magnitude star as a star that is 100 times as bright as a sixth-magnitude star, thereby establishing the logarithmic scale still in use today. This implies that a star of magnitude m is about 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude m + 1. This figure, the fifth root of 100, became known as Pogson's Ratio.
Hmmph. I'd prefer a system where higher numbers were brighter, and probably with a different logarithmic base. Oh well.
The stars had already been described for millennia as being stars of the 1st magnitude, 2nd magnitude and so on, from the brightest to the less bright.
Pogson has chosen both the logarithmic base and the sign of the magnitude which makes higher number less bright, so that the magnitudes computed by his formula will match approximately the already existing classification of the stars.
It was fortunate that the simple rule that a difference of 5 in magnitudes corresponds to a brightness ratio of 100 gave a formula which produced magnitude values that, when rounded to integers, matched in many cases the traditional magnitudes of the stars.
The ISS will still generally be the first, second, or third brightest thing in the night sky on a good, near-overhead pass.
An uncaught error where you don't catch and gracefully handle errors in your promises is not the users' fault. It's sloppy workmanship.
This specific error means you deleted the standard functions that implement the geolocation API, which is a completely different thing. That's fine too, you're welcome to browse the web with a broken configuration, but you have to realize that it will break things. You're not automatically entitled to request that every site support your broken configuration. It should also be noted that browsing with a non-default configuration like this makes you an easy target for fingerprinting.
Note that the site absolutely requires some form of geolocation to work at all. Satellite viewing times are location specific and without a precise location the site can't show you anything useful.
That's a rather flimsy straw man. I did no such thing.
> You're not automatically entitled to request that every site support your broken configuration.
Goodness, now I'm entitled.
I did no such thing; I just said that blaming your users for your sloppy coding is a terrible strategy.
You should be able to specify a viewing location if geolocation is blocked.
> If you get this error, you intentionally broke your browser,
What I did was that I went into browser's preferences and set "geo.enabled" to false.
> Note that the site absolutely requires some form of geolocation to work at all.
Oh, please, I am perfectly capable of finding my village on the globe by hand.
There are many other ways to approximate a client's geolocation so as to prevent displaying an embarrassing error where one did not first check whether the object's property was truthy or not.
Justifying terrible UX by saying, "it's free," is a terrible strategy, tbh. Free shit is still shit.
Your point isn't quite wrong but it also isn't quite right; geolocation is supported by every browser listed on Mozilla's documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/g...) so if a browser isn't at least stubbing out that API these days, it's not w3c-compliant, and non-w3c-compliant browsers will sometimes just break on some pages.
It is, of course, still incumbent on the developer to go that extra mile if they want to catch that last 1% of users, but users of exotic browsers get an exotic experience also.
In any event, I would never tell my users that it's their fault that my app didn't check the truthiness of the object's property. Seems particularly hostile to one's users and customers, free product or not.
That's WiFi only iPads - the iPads with 3G/4G comms used to have GPS, at least the 2011 iPad2 did.
Probably still do, my current cheap Android tablet with 4G does.
Technically, we should be checking everything.
Practically, nobody does.
Secure context: This feature is available only in secure contexts (HTTPS), in some or all supporting browsers.
So perhaps the site isn't being loaded over HTTPS? If that's the case, it sounds like a site bug.
https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...
I am curious as to:
- What provides the 3D earth model
- What calculates the satellite trajectory and plots its arc
- What client side & server side frameworks you used for the web app itself
https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...