When I was a kid, my mom used to say: “The Sun in Europe during winter is this tiny little thing, and by 3 PM it’s almost night time.” Although I liked astronomy, that seemed strange to me. They also said things like the day lasted 6 months at the poles and the night the same, another thing that seemed like a legend to me. I had never been to Europe, nor anywhere near the poles.
Later in school, I could glimpse a bit of how that Sun thing worked, but only in theory and with some texts and not-too-clear illustrations that showed the solar system, or little drawings of the Earth and the Sun in a two-dimensional plane that I never managed to translate 100% to reality.
It was years later, around the late eighties, when using Distant Suns on the Amiga 500, that I could really perceive the Sun’s movement from a specific point on Earth. Distant Suns was (and still is!) astronomy software, and it served to visualize the universe. Quite simple, you would set position coordinates, coordinates to look at, and a date. The date could be advanced or rewound with a couple of clicks. I set some place at the North Pole, looked towards the Sun and advanced time… magically I saw how the sun was on its way to set, but before reaching the horizon line it kind of stayed still, moved a little to the side, and went back up… Days and nights during summer passed like this, with a Sun that didn’t set, and in winter it was the opposite, in Distant Suns’ simulation you could see the Sun below the horizon almost wanting to rise, but not managing to do so. It was a wonderful moment.
Distant Suns on the Commodore Amiga - The software that made astronomy tangible
Sometimes it happens that in education, if you don’t manage to experience things, simulate them, or live them yourself, you don’t manage to understand them deeply. And good software achieves that, it manages to put the person in a certain place and lets them experiment so they can understand, move the levers and see what happens.
Now living in Europe, every time I see the Sun so tiny I remember all this, my mom’s words, the Amiga, Distant Suns and the wonders of software.
I just realized that Distant Suns was created by a person named Mike Smithwick and that to this day he continues making the software for mobile devices. The first prototype was in 1985 for the Amiga 1000, according to his words:
“Years ago, around 1985, I had the bright idea of doing a little astronomy program for my new Commodore Amiga 1000. I made a 22-line prototype in Basic, and then for the next two decades I dedicated myself to ‘polishing it a bit’”
Mike Smithwick https://distantsuns.com/distant-suns-for-ios10-years/
Distant Suns migrated from the Amiga, to Mac (OS 6-9), Windows 3, Windows 95, Linux and finally iOS.
In this post from his company you can read a bit more about its history: https://distantsuns.com/distant-suns-for-ios10-years/
Thank you Mike Smithwick for all this. You can visit the Distant Suns site at this link: https://distantsuns.com/