FINISHED!

I am finally done with my final project. In the end, it took three straight days of hardcore guess and check point placing on turtle. It was difficult but I feel really accomplished, and though there might have been other ways to do this program, I can honestly say I used all that I had learned and I accomplished my goal of creating a computer program that actually does something.

I have officially decided exactly what my program will do, and it's a bit tedious. Basically, you will type in the planet of interest and the month, and it will give you information about said planet and show you a diagram of what the planets look like in that month. I'm making the diagrams by hand using turtle, which means with 8 planets and 12 months, 96 little dots I have to make. I gotta get to work!!

My final project is finally picking up. Dr. Ardito helped me fix the bugs in the data displaying program, so now I can just manipulate this set up with the data that I want to display. I so far have the user type in the number of planets the planet is from the sun, and then it displays the name and other things about the planet, like orbital velocity, revolution period, etc. It's not done, but it's definitely improving.

My progress...

so far I've been using a template to play around with the data I have put in excel, but there's a bug that I can't seem to work out. The program won't recognize the excel .csv file that holds the data, so somehow I have to work that out. Once I get past this, I can expand the data and put it together so that the user can see where the planets are in relation to the earth on a given day. I may even expand this to a turtle graphic- but I need to get past this first.

     Now that I've found a simple data source, I can start to plan out what exactly my program will do. My first step is to transfer the information into an excel spreadsheet, and decide what information I will really need to combine into variables and equations.
     Next I will begin to lay out the equations I will need, using the planets' rotation information and distance from the sun and earth to find the location of a planet at any given date (provided by the user).

Week 1

        Basically, my final project plan is to design a program that lets the user input their date and possible location, and with this information, it will return to you various astronomical measurements regarding planetary orbits, eclipses, and more.
        My first goal in starting my project is finding a recent and relevant data source to manipulate and compile information. I've yet to find exactly what I'm looking for, so that might influence the design of my project and change what info the program will give back to the user.
        That's my progress so far...

BLAH