Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaillancourt88
Are we thinking in the right "sphere"? What about Right Ascension, Declination, Date....It would give the position of some celestial object, and explain the 3rd number, and Dave Lavery is a NASA guy...anyone have a starmapping program handy?
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That was something I actually thought of, so a couple days ago I fired up
Stellarium to check. I tried observing using using equatorial coordinates, as well as from both Manchester, NH and Copley Sqaure, on both December 7th, 1900 and December 8th, 2007 at 5:48:41AM.
While there are some celestial bodies nearby, none are at the coordinates with the precision specified, and those that are close don't have any remarkable names.
Converting from degrees to hours, minutes, and seconds is easy.
Take the number, if it's negative, add it to 360. For example -71.076072 becomes 288.9239. Divide by 15 to get the hours. Take the fractional part, then multiply it by 60 to get minutes. Take the fractional part of that, and again multiply it by 60 to get seconds. So -71.078072 becomes 19hr5min41.724sec