Our work
Education · Astronomy
Orbitra
The solar system in 3D, with every planet where it is on that day
The demo is a recreation of the system, with made-up data: the original belongs to the client and is not published. No sign-up needed.
The context
A planetarium, a science museum or a school publisher that needs to show the solar system. What's out there are looping animations, where the planets spin at made-up speeds and nothing is where it really is, or desktop simulators built for astronomers that a twelve-year-old won't open twice.
What the system does
- Every planet at its real position for the chosen date, computed from JPL's orbital elements and Kepler's equation, from 1800 to 2050
- Time speeds up from real time to a year per second, slows down or runs backwards, and the physics holds at any speed
- Earth spins on sidereal time: day and night fall on each city at the hour they really do, with city lights on the dark side
- Enhanced scale to see everything together and true scale, with a continuous transition between them
- A live card for every body: distance from Earth, light travel time, orbital speed and where it sits between perihelion and aphelion
- The sky calendar —oppositions, conjunctions, seasons and moon phases— found in the same orbits, with a button that takes the scene to that moment
- All eight planets compared at the same scale, across seven measures, plus your weight on each world
