[Kstars-devel] Drawing comet tail patch

[Charles Peng]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 09:09:15PM +0530, Akarsh Simha wrote:
> 
> 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?)

I tried to find descriptions on the trajectory but failed. I think that
the trajectory is calculated implicitly in some member function that I
didn't notice. Could you tell me how can I find the information related?

I looked at the cosine rule for a spherical triangle. The rule is simple
but yes lots of calculations are needed.

Regards,
--
Charles