Chapter 224 - Sol Three Hundred and Thirty-Three, Eve (2/2)
“Sleep well. If you can’t sleep, count sheep.”
It released Tang Yue’s hand, turned, left the sleeping quarters, and drew the curtains along the way.
…
Tomcat sat on the table piled high with paper and charts. The long numbers were dazzling to the eye as if they were some cryptic code. Tomcat was like an astronomer in ancient times, doing something no one understood. Before large-aperture telescopes and computers were invented, the daily work of astronomers was math. They would use pen and paper to calculate, handling massive amounts of observation data before finding a brand new celestial body in the massive amount of data.
To laypeople, astronomers of that day and age were mysterious and unfathomable. People even believed that they could see the future. This was because the numbers on these people’s scrap paper could predict full solar eclipses.
Tomcat was doing something similar at the moment.
Using a sextant allowed it to obtain the latitude, but it wasn’t able to directly observe the longitude. To obtain one’s longitude, other methods were needed. Tomcat was going through an extremely precise star catalog. This thing helped prevent them from getting lost in the desert.
“11… 261.233.541… 155.355.715…”
“12… 200.351.547, 399.241.955…”
Tomcat sat in its chair motionless. It held a pen in its paw with a charging cable connected to its back. Its furry body was curled into a ball as its long fur was fluttering in the breeze.
“12, 26.413.273…”
“12, 274.360.669…”
It muttered softly and calculated as it wrote inside a chart. The clock was ticking away.
There was silence from the sleeping quarters since Tang Yue had finally fallen asleep.
Deeper into the night, the amount of paper piled on the desk became taller than Tomcat. These papers had numbers that were the results of a calculation and not the calculation process. Without Tang Yue, Tomcat didn’t need to show its work to anyone. It did all the calculations mentally, but due to the massive amounts of data, there was not enough white paper. Eventually, it had to reuse some of the scrap paper.
Tomcat tidied the data and stacked them together before placing them into a drawer.
If there wasn’t an accident, these sheets of paper would stay there till the end of the world.
“SUN, 10:00, 102.543.027…
“FRIDAY.
“01, 02, 03, …, 23.
“Next is SATURDAY.
00, 102.548.227, 104.424.152, 212.240.270, 01…
“195.544.473.
“01, 25, 02, 52, 03, 45.
“Next is SUNDAY.
“SUNDAY.
“Sunday… Sunday, where is it on Sunday?”
After an unknown period of time, Tomcat put away its pen in satisfaction and exhaled, declaring that everything was a success. The sunlight beneath the horizon had already illuminated the sky.