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So-I-Decided-to-Program-a-Solar-System-Simulator.md

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So I Decided to Program a Solar System Simulator

or how a Javascript experiment became a t-shirt by Martin Vézina

Part 1. jsOrrery: a personal javascript project

  • visited Kennedy Space Centre and found a renewed interest in his childhood love of space
  • inspired after seeing images of trajectories of Apollo craft
  • decided that instead of wasting time on Reddit, he’d waste time coding a javascript pet project
  • idea was to model an orrery in the browser
  • looked up an old Flash project he’d done that used some of the basic math that this project needed
  • using three.js to computer positions of planets
  • created a 2D simulation on Canvas
  • later added the 3rd dimension to it, using 3d context in Canvas
  • added a “shitload of stars - because why not” - found a data set with the positions of all kinds of stars and placed them in a particle system in a sphere that is attached to the camera position
  • positioning the moon is particularly troublesome - in the 60’s two French astronomers developed a massive formula for calculating the moon’s position - it accounts for all the different factors that effect the moon’s position. Using this formula was able to get things precise enough to simulate an eclipse.
  • once the moon was in place decided to simulate an Apollo mission
  • let it sit on Github for awhile, then posted to Google Experiments, after which it got featured on NASA’s website

Part 2: spacetime coordinates

A kickstarter project to produce a t-shirt

  • artist’s initial plan was to taker a date provided by a backer and give them a t-shirt with the solar systems positions on that date
  • ended up raising $83000 (Euros)
  • could not fulfill the demand by hand
  • took some artistic liberties to blow out the inner orbits to make them visible
  • contacted Martin to see if he could help
  • had to figure out some changes to handle the artistic vision
  • to draw the orbits, thought maybe he’d used SVG, but landed on using Illustrator scripting to generate the final output files directly
  • the 3D version was created using vertices on the path of the orbits, then drawing lines between them
  • used these vertices to calculate how to draw the ellipses representing the orbits
  • ended up being able to provide her with Excel files that she could use to generate the designs for printing

“Don’t be afraid of not knowing - there’s a beauty to imperfection” “The destination is not what counts - it’s the unexpected that makes the trip memorable” “Fun stuff can be serious - your pet projects might be more valuable than you think”