It occurs to me that if you had a 360 degree camera, some image-processing software to pick out reference stars (Current research telescopes/facilities probably have such software), and a set of pre-computed hash tables for dates/times/stars/locations, then your proposed device would probably be workable. The heavy lifting of computing your astronomical rainbow table would be performed by number-crunching in the current time. The database would probably be very large and you'd have plenty of collisions on individual star/reference point's hash tables to dates and locales, but probably very few duplicate collisions if you implement every reference point as it's own hash table and then take the union of the results, or the union of the results widened by a margin of error that is relative to how distant you are from known (current) space/time.
This presumes that the models used to compute the hash tables are highly accurate in their predictions.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-06-18 04:25 pm (UTC)This presumes that the models used to compute the hash tables are highly accurate in their predictions.