Bruckner Designed Logo

Orbital Graphing / Ephemeris GUI

The project was originally to provide an alternate method of access to NASA's Telnet based Horizons Ephemeris featuring a graphical user interface aimed at amateur astronomers. The Horizons Ephemeris is intended for scientific use and after discussions with the good people at NASA it was agreed that this would cause multiple parallel accesses to their database resulting in a reduction of service for scientific use. I decided I would host the data myself.

I wrote a telnet client that iterated through all major solar system bodies, downloading data in daily steps from 1564 to 2564 or the earliest and latest available dates. I then set up a server in order to host the data, however with a residential internet connection upload rates of only 512kb could be achieved and this would not handle the load. At a later point, if my connection improves, I would like to host this as intended.

Because I cannot run the interface I designed, I have just created a small programme to render the orbits of the major solar system bodies. I have used this as a teaching aide when discussing the solar system.

I would like to personally thank Alan Chamberlin and Jon Giorgini from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology for without their help I would not have been able to progress this project. Thank You.


Inner Solar System Orbits for 100 years

This is a render of orbits taken from a reduced dataset showing the inner solar system bodies.


Oscillation of the Sun

This image shows the 'wobble' of the Sun around the solar system centre.


Precession of Mercury

This is an image showing the change in Mercury's orbit over 5 years.