Solar System Live
Welcome to Solar System Live, the interactive
Orrery of the Web. You can view the
entire Solar System,
or just the inner planets
(through the orbit of Mars). Controls allow you to set time and date,
viewpoint, observing location, orbital elements to track an asteroid or
comet, and a variety of other parameters. Click on the title of any
control to display a help page explaining it, or go directly to the
help table of contents. You can compose
a request with custom settings and save the
results in your browser's hotlist or bookmark table, allowing direct
access to Solar System Live with all the controls preset to your own
preferences.
To use Solar System Live, you need a graphical Web browser with forms
support and the ability to display GIF images.
Windows users can create orrery displays like this in real time, on their own
machines, as well as view the Earth, sky, stars at the horizon,
track Earth satellites, and more with
Home Planet, my public domain
Earth/Space/Sky simulator available for your
FTPing pleasure. Other public domain
astronomy and space software available from this site includes:
- On the Web:
- Earth Viewer.
- Terranova: a new terraformed planet every day.
- For Windows:
- Home Planet,
Sky screen saver,
Moontool,
Craters screen saver, and
an Excel catalogue of the Palomar
Observatory Sky Survey.
- For Unix (X/OpenWindows):
- Moontool, and
Xsunclock.
All of these packages and more can be located from my
home page.
Solar System Live would have been enormously more difficult to implement
without the help of the freely distributed software mentioned in
the credits.
Implementation details are also available.
by John Walker
kelvin@fourmilab.ch