[TML] Alderson disk

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

Did a rough calculation a bit ago. Looks like if I want the sun to 
reach 45 degrees above the horizon at 1 AU from the center, the days 
are going to be *really* long.

I get a figure of 48 hours from sunhigh to sunset. Which gives a 
cycle like this (using A and B to represent the sides of the disk):

time A	       B
  0  sunhigh  midnight
 48  sunset   sunrise
 96  midnight sunhigh
144  sunset   sunrise
192  sunhigh  midnight

That's just a hair extreme.   

Also, the motion of the sun will be really non-linear. I'll be 
writing a program to give time and angle at 1 AU later (ignoring 
atmospheric refraction). Other latitudes can be worked out easily 
from that.

If folks are interested in working on this, I'll stick stuff up on a 
web page as we nail stuff down.

ps. to get 12 hours from sunhigh to sunset gives really low sun 
angles. So if folks think the long days and nights can be worked 
with, I'd rather keep them.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com