Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Simulate all the planets

So I was searching for a better simulation framework for my Solar System orrery project, and somebody pointed me to three.js, a WebGL 3D-Library. It looked promising. Now it would be nice to do that with all the planets, and somebody already thought the same. Even better. Of course, while a nice simulation, the models left a little bit to be desired in terms of accuracy, so I tried upon myself to improve that. Well, see the result below for yourself. Click/tap on the buttons at left to select a model, holding down a mouse button will stop the rotation.

Sun
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Moon
Mars
Vesta
Ceres
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
Carl

The bodies rotate with the same relative speed as their natural brethren, although a wee bit faster in absolute terms. The tilt agains the ecliptic is also equvalent

See some more examples here, all the planets dancing in a circle, Earth and Moon doing their thing. Check out the documentation or fork/download the threex.planets source in the GitHub repository. It also includes all the credits for the image sources.

So I was searching for a better simulation framework for my Solar System orrery project, and somebody pointed me to three.js, a WebGL 3D-Library. It looked promising. Now it would be nice to do that with all the planets, and somebody already thought the same. Even better. Of course, while a nice simulation, the models left a little bit to be desired in terms of accuracy, so I tried upon myself to improve that. Well, see the result below for yourself. Click/tap on the buttons at left to select a model.

See some more examples here, all the planets dancing in a circle, Earth and Moon doing their thing. Check out the documentation or fork/download the planets source in the GitHub repository.

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