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[NIXONWASFRAMED]

[SPEC] Coordinates and Constellations

[msekolpsu]

Does anyone have the means to test this?

I love this theory. It includes the times nicely. What I'd like to see is the position of the North Star or sun in the sky at these times and from these locations (I'm still going with an encrypted message here).

Maybe the computer is trying to navigate and find geographical locations using the position of the North Star as it peeks it's head out to see where it is.

[sfsdfd]

I think it's very highly doubtful, for several reasons:

1) It would be extremely difficult to choose coordinates that closely line up with both population centers and a particular constellation.

2) There are an insanely vast number of constellations (with the added complication that you can view those constellations from any angle, which exponentially increases this insane number.) Thus, the solution would require an unimaginably huge data trawl from a hundred different starmap sources.

The PMs would not expect us to tackle a reference of that magnitude without having very firmly pointed us in that direction. A few of the more fiendish puzzles from the Evan Chan game involved messages encrypted with a World War II Enigma machine; finding and operating a simulator proved very difficult. But we weren't expected to guess that connection out of thin air, or based on a few offhanded comments; we were given some very direct, obviously relevant stories about people encoding messages with Enigma machines.

Puzzles should be hard because they're hard, not because they're completely arbitrary. The PMs know this and have consistently given us good puzzles. Guessing games just aren't any fun.

3) Probably a million such constellations can be shoehorned to fit any given coordinate set. This strikes me as so subjective that a hundred people would reach a hundred different plausible results - much like "INDEX THIS IRONCLAD FORECAST," and hearing the words "Christ" in the sound files.

- David Stein

[ilovecheese]

Re: [SPEC] Coordinates and Constellations

[hamatoyoshi]

I looked into Sunrise/Sunset/Moonrise/Moonset a bit here:

Compute Sunrise/Sunset

While some of the locations and times are close, it just doesn't seem to hold out. Given the intervals in times and the distribution, I'm finding it difficult to see what kind of celestial event would coincide with them all exactly.

I'm also not sure what importance the degree of accuracy would have for celestial events.

[hamatoyoshi]

Another celestial item this data could cover is occultation.

Measuring when different items in space eclipse each other. It apparently leads to higher accuracy of the distances between items in space.

I don't think it's important, as it's something that's insanely technical, but it's something I stumbled upon trying to think of what use the data could be for.