The clouds were rolling in fast so I had to be quick with this one.
Taken through a Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ telescope with an iPhone held by hand up to the eye piece. This technique works remarkably well for The Moon. It becomes a lot more tricky when it comes to planets though.
Thanks for stopping by. So here is my little gravity application. It’s very early in development so don’t be surprised to find bugs, as with all development projects I know how to use it to avoid problems. Click on the image below to launch the app (you’ll need flash player), you can download that from here : http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ .
Here’s a brief tutorial of how to use it. I’ve defaulted some of the values so that it starts at 3% zoom and a large enough orbit line thickness so we can see what’s going on. Before you do anything, turn on the “Show Orbits” check box. Then hit the Load button. This pulls in the starting values for planets.
Diagram to show the orbit when different Y-Velocity is given.
Check out this post for more details on how to use the application : https://danthaiwang.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/pldm-orbiter/
If you’d like to play around with the starting values (that get loaded in via XML) then download the application from here : pldmOrbiterApplication.zip Inside the zip you’ll need to run the index.html. You can manipulate the starting data by editing the XML in the folder ‘saveddata’. Once you’ve saved the file ‘Remove All’ bodies from the stage and then press load again to see your changes.
My goal is to try to get tiny planets orbiting from a long distance away.
Let me know your thoughts. dan@pldm.co.uk
Another astronomy inspired Actionscript application for pldm. With Orbiter you can add “bodies” to the stage, setting it’s name, mass, radius, x-velocity, y-velocity and colour. Then let them go and see what sort of solar system you end up with.
Link to Version 1.0 Beta : http://pldm.co.uk/orbiter/
http://www.pldm.co.uk/solarsystem/Main.swf
I couldn’t find an interactive correct scale solar system anywhere. So I built one. Not finished yet. Lots more plans for it. If the imagery upsets anyone, please let me know and I’ll delete them. I found all the images via a google image search.
Bone Yard 