From the United Kingdom, the National Schools' Observatory website contains a number of astronomical simulations, including an orrery (An animated model of the solar system and it’s planet’s orbits around the sun), an animated explanation of what causes night and day, and where stars, the sun and the moon are in the sky over a 24 hour period, a simulation of movement of stars across the night’s sky from different locations on the earth, and a handful of other simulations.
The simulations here are all problematic, either through faulty user interfaces or a lack of sufficient explanation during the simulation.
The electric orrery would have been one of the better simulations, but it shows only a small window on the rotations of the planets around the sun. Most of the screen area is for the display of the legend, graphics indicating which planet is which in the animation.
The Day & Night and Spinning Earth simulations simply display a quick animation of the movement of the heavenly bodies. No points of reference are highlighted, no particularly note-worthy bodies are pointed out, and no explanation of what you are looking at is provided. In addition, the user interface that acts as the gateway to the animations is counter-intuitive, which would have been more troublesome were there a reasonable number of options to choose from.
In fact, the only really useful simulation of the bunch is the Life of Stars, and it doesn’t use any animation at all. Instead, the user steps through the a set of slides, each with a graphic depicting a particular point in the star’s evolution along with an explanation of that point.
Overall, these simulations suffer from animation for animation’s sake, and don’t provide useful information until the gimmickry is stripped away.
Posted by Joshua Bleier
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