[Kstars-devel] Drawing comet tail patch

[Akarsh Simha]

> Will a straight tail tangent to the trajectory do? Describing the
> trajectory as part of a ellipse is easy, but what to describe the tail
> shape? Qt doesn't seem to support higher order Bezier curves.
> Thinking...

Yes. I guess we could keep the tail tangent to the trajectory. The
curvature of the ellipse should hardly matter, given the size of the
tail. Besides, I'm pretty sure these things are empirical as well.

You could even think of the celestial sphere as flat and neglect its
curvature while drawing the tail. Else you'll have to do some strong
trigonometry and things will get more complicated. (Ever looked at the
cosine rule for a spherical triangle?)

Regards
Akarsh