Orbita - Simulate and visualize orbits of solar system bodies such as planets, comets and asteroids.

What is Orbita

Orbita is a Qt6/OpenGL based program that renders our solar system in 3D. Positions and orbits of planets, comets and asteroids are calculated by means of libnova library. The Keplerian elements are taken from the Minor Planet Center. For comets download the latest file CometEls.txt and for asteroids MPCORB.DAT.

The Keplerian elements of files CometEls.txt and MPCORB.DAT are stored in a SQLite database. This enables for instance querying Jupiter trojan asteroids

SELECT * FROM asteroids where type = 9

and visualizing their positions: or any other Keplerian elements SQL queries.

Interactive Animations of Orbita

Visualize trajectory of comet 1I/ʻOumuamua

Visualize first 1957 listed asteroids in MPCORB.DAT and rotate around X-axis.

Visualize first 4 listed asteroids in MPCORB.DAT with orbits, date, distance to earth/sun and magnitude.

Compile and Download

For compiling orbita Qt6 and libnova library are required. A binary executable for Windows 64 can be downloaded here: orbita-0.1.1-win64.zip

License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3 license.