Orbit-Precession Cycles, anyone?
Posted: 15.08.2007, 04:30
To make a rather long story short, I got interested in visualizing how the planets' orbits precess as a result of the planets' gravitational pulls on each other. And for doing that, I found a paper with solutions extending back 10 million years: Secular evolution of the solar system over 10 million years.
I extracted the numbers from that paper and made animations from them for all the planets from Mercury to Neptune. I then uploaded them to YouTube and collected into these YouTube playlists:
The last million years
The last 10 million years
The axis labels are not rendered very clearly, so here they are:
Eccentricity videos:
e cos(omega)
e sin(omega)
e = eccentricity
omega = longitude of perihelion
Inclination videos:
sin(i/2) cos(Omega)
sin(i/2) sin(Omega)
i = inclination
Omega = longitude of ascending node
I'm willing to e-mail the numbers I'd extracted to anyone who might be interested in implementing them in Celestia or whatever.
I've also found papers on solutions for the Earth's spin precession, and also for orbits of satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, in case anyone is interested. I can extract the numbers with the OCR software that I'd used on the planet-orbit results.
I extracted the numbers from that paper and made animations from them for all the planets from Mercury to Neptune. I then uploaded them to YouTube and collected into these YouTube playlists:
The last million years
The last 10 million years
The axis labels are not rendered very clearly, so here they are:
Eccentricity videos:
e cos(omega)
e sin(omega)
e = eccentricity
omega = longitude of perihelion
Inclination videos:
sin(i/2) cos(Omega)
sin(i/2) sin(Omega)
i = inclination
Omega = longitude of ascending node
I'm willing to e-mail the numbers I'd extracted to anyone who might be interested in implementing them in Celestia or whatever.
I've also found papers on solutions for the Earth's spin precession, and also for orbits of satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, in case anyone is interested. I can extract the numbers with the OCR software that I'd used on the planet-orbit results.