Skip to main content

Controlling other Geo-Apps with CesiumJS MCP

 Moving the camera to see the sky in CesiumJS maps has always been a little bit difficult for me. So,m when CesiumJS announced their baseline MCP for controlling the camera on CesiumJS maps, I leaped at the chance to try out an MCP and to grab hold of better control of my map camera. 

This week, the sujbect of eclipses came up in my Gladych Files research. (Ferry Barrows Colton, famed National Geographic Science writer of the 1940s was part of the 1947 Brazil eclipse expedtiion, and was also on board the Normandie with Tom Slick in 1937.) That reminded me of the following picture I took of the 2017 eclipse from Wyoming. 


I've wanted to identify the stars on that picture for years, so I was curious if CesiumJS had accurate constellation maps for a given date and time. Turns out, they do.

But, how to look at the stars? I revived my MCP camera control server for CesiumJS in a few minutes by starting Codex in the repo directory on my local machine, and asking it to start everything back up. I asked ChatGPT to create a czml for me that contained the viewing sites and dates of both the 1947 eclipse, (Brazil), and the 2017 eclipse, (my viewing spot north of Jefffrey City, WY.) A while later, I was reliably viewing both eclipses using Cesium JS. 


I haven't verified the star maps yet, but I don know that the sky view from Brazil, 1947 is different from Wyoming, 2017. Here's 2017


As an interesting aside, there are more stars on the Cesium sky map than those that jump out. Turning up the brightness on a screen capture of the sky image gives something more like this. 


OK, so, finally, here's the new and intersting part. Once you have an MCP camera control server running for CesiumJS, if there's an app on a website that's not yours, and if you can find a handle in JavaScript to the apps CesiumJS viewer, you can control the camera there too.

I know this because I found a demo site built for siggraph 2017 that included a trace of the moons shadow on the Earth at the time of the eclipse. I asked Codex if this would work and it helpfully offered to create the code for me. We had to run through a few iterations, but finally worked it all out.

And so, you can see that I can look right at the eclipse using MCP


and then, turn around and look at the Earth.


Notice that in each image, the sky map changes, as it should.

The server is still running a little slow, mostly because of the LLM, for my taste, but it's incredibly handy to have around as a tool.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...
10 comments
Read more

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the  +Sage Mathematical Software System  today, (the files been  added to the public repository [3]).  If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica.  Oh, and it' free.  I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory.  What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly.  Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...
2 comments
Read more

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...
1 comment
Read more