Huh, looking at that Orrery, I realise my mental map of the solar system was a little off.<p>I always though comets like Haley's went much further out on their trip away from the sun, but that shows it doesn't even reach past Pluto.<p>And the orbits of Mercury and Mars are a lot less circular than I thought.
Here's the article describing how the simulator was built: <a href="http://lab.la-grange.ca/en/building-jsorrery-a-javascript-webgl-solar-system" rel="nofollow">http://lab.la-grange.ca/en/building-jsorrery-a-javascript-we...</a>
I really like how you've documented the challenges you encountered. The "Building jsOrrery" article is probably one of the best sources on the internet describing the process of building a full solar system viz. Your code is also very logical and easy to follow.<p>I made a similar simulation that shows the inner planets and asteroids, called Asterank (<a href="http://asterank.com/3d" rel="nofollow">http://asterank.com/3d</a>). Your code is open source, but does it have a license? I'm interested in adapting your accurate star background for my simulation.
for the people who came here wanting to see a solar system simulation, here's the direct link:<p><a href="http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/" rel="nofollow">http://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/</a>
That is more then awesome, I will show it to my daughter, it is funny how different the reality is to the map of our solar system we get through traditional media like TV.
Looking at this, it's hard to believe that we have subsisted for so long on the standard top down flat version of this that we have seen in books since... Pluto was discovered. The children of the future will not have to remember those dark days.<p>Solar System visualization industry: Disrupted.
For fans of this, the biggest project on this subject is traditionally Celestia, but that's pretty long in the tooth now.<p><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/</a>