Space
by BlueThen on Sep.06, 2010, under Dev Log
Ok. Maybe I couldn’t get some stuff done. Over the summer, I’ve made about 17 different applications, all of which I felt wasn’t really worthy of publishing. Most of them were experiments anyways, which I did learn a lot from.
I did finally finish something for release though. A few days ago there was a video on YouTube made by a person named Scott Manley (click this sentence), showing a time lapse of asteroid discoveries since 1980. I thought that this was neat enough to make a 3D version (provided there was enough data, and there was) of the simulation.
After about a week and a half of putting together various formulas and spending entire days trying to find missing parentheses and other major but hard to find typos in the code, I came out with a 35 second video showing asteroid placement in relation to orbits close to the sun (click this sentence too).
I hope to clean up the code and possibly open source it later (no promises). All of my resources can be found in the description on vimeo. If you don’t like vimeo and would rather YouTube, click here.
September 7th, 2010 on 1:49 am
Great work, glad I inspired people to do more than freak out about the number of red dots on my video
Will definitly have to look into processing, my old framebuffer code is from the dark ages and while it’s fast it’s not something I’d feel comfortable releasing.
One suggestion I have to improve your 3d verions is to add some sort of depth fogging or fading the objects further away from the camera so that the 3d depth becomes more obvious. I did this in my edge on video, and it helps clue the eye into what’s nearer and further from the camera.
September 7th, 2010 on 9:28 pm
Hi. Yeah, I’ll probably implement that for the cleaned up version (lets just say this version is an ultra-slow “prototype”). Another thing with my video is the motion of the camera is covering up the motion of the asteroids, so you can’t really tell if they’re orbiting or if they’re just sitting there.
This is my only time I’ve worked with anything astronomy-related. So this was a bit frustrating with trying to put it all together. I understand plenty of trig, but things like “Eccentricity” and what-not throws me off. So one question: how did you find the asteroid discovery date? I see data for last time the asteroid was computed, but nothing on the first discovery date.
That’s the only thing that’s making me reluctant to call my video accurate at all, because I just base the mean anomaly off of velocity ((2 * PI) / periodOfOrbit), and the initial mean anomaly the astorb.dat file provides.