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Solar System Simulator

Posted by michael on from the the-joy-of-rendering dept.

Greylark writes "The Solar System Simulator lets you see a number of different planets and moons from a number of different positions in the solar system, at any day and time in a 800 year period." This is very cool, and even though it's been around for a while, we don't seem to have run it before.

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Orrery by Speare · · Score: 3

    A model of a solar or planetary system is called an orrery.

    If you're looking for these, including this word in your search will find a lot more. Many types of orrery have been made of brass for hundreds of years.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  2. Another little something by The+Good+Reverend · · Score: 3

    NASA's site seems either down, slow, or slashdotted. There's also the Solar System Live (http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Solar/actio n?sys=-Sf). It appears to be/do the same thing (though I haven't seen the NASA site).

    The Good Reverend
    I'm different, just like everybody else.

  3. Similar (and not so similar) Stuff by Guppy06 · · Score: 3
    John Walker (of Autodesk fame) has his own site at http://www.fourmilab.ch with a lot of nifty stuff. Amongst other things is his astronomy section, where he has the Earth and Moon Viewer, which allows you to see beautiful images of what the earth or moon look like at any time, and from various viewpoints (including from satellites), Solar System Live, which is a virtual orrery that shows you what positions the planets are in at any time, and Home Planet, which is a Windows program that combines the first two sites with a few other features. There's also a few public domain UNIX programs (w/ source), but they're a bit old (OpenWindows, anyone?) and will require a bit of tinkering to convert to run natively in KDE or Gnome. (If only I knew how to program well...)

    If you get Home Planet, other useful things are NISTime (freeware time synch program from NIST) available here, and you can get two-line satellite tracking (TLE) info (also useful at the Earth and Moon Viewer site) from NORAD's satellite catalog here. It's all text files, and there are several that are designed for automated downloads for the real fanatics.

    In general, everything is surprisingly simple, and it doesn't take much to, say, get the latest telemtry on Endeavor (STS-100) here, cut-and-paste it into a Home Planet satellite database (text file), and see exactly where the shuttle is.