Solar System Objects

Latest revision as of 17:41, 13 November 2011

Solar System objects are defined in the ssystem.ini file in the data directory. It can be extended to contain comets and asteroids. Here are a few extended ssystem.ini files which you can use. If you want just some of the bodies from one file and some from another, you will have to copy and paste the relevant sections of the various files together into your own ssystem.ini file.

Future versions of Stellarium will contain some sort of method to manage groups of extra bodies, but for now it is manual.

[edit] Lists

[edit] Notes

• ssystem.ini structure: Your ssystem.ini file must contain all bodies referenced as parent bodies of objects in your ssystem.ini file - you can't say that the moon is in orbit around Earth, and then not have an Earth body - Stellarium will crash if you do this.
• the MPC list: The current version of Stellarium is not designed to handle the complete list of objects by the Minor Planet Center. So please use this file to copy-paste your preferred objects into your own ssystem.ini file. This list is (automatically) updated regularly to reflect the quickly growing number of known dwarf planets and other small bodies of the solar system. Currently, the (unpacked) file is 140 MB (and growing), so make sure you have an editor which can handle files that large ;-). At present MPCORB is not available via anon-ftp on MPC site, so the updates are currently not fully automatic.

[edit] Single objects

This section contains code describing some often requested individual objects.

[edit] Comet 103P-Hartley

Ephemerides based on JPL's HORIZONS system using 2010-10 as reference date. Special thanks to Ferry. Code is for Stellarium 0.10.5 , add it to your data/ssystem.ini .

[103P-Hartley]
name = 103P-Hartley
parent = Sun
coord_func = comet_orbit
radius = 10
oblateness = 0.0
albedo = 1
lighting = true
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_map = nomap.png
tex_halo = star16x16.png
orbit_Epoch = 2455470.5
orbit_SemiMajorAxis = 3.4726656
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.6951420
orbit_Inclination =  13.61768
orbit_AscendingNode = 219.76087
orbit_ArgOfPericenter =  181.19852
orbit_MeanAnomaly = 355.84874

[edit] Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin)

Source: This code has been created by hendrik_d, based on JPL's HORIZON system as of October 2010.

[C\2007 N3 Lulin]
name = C/2007 N3 Lulin
parent = Sun
coord_func = comet_orbit
radius = 10
oblateness = 0.0
albedo = 1
lighting = true
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_map = nomap.png
tex_halo = star16x16.png
orbit_Epoch = 2454806.5
orbit_SemiMajorAxis = 70409.3419307421
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.9999827827050909
orbit_Inclination =  178.3736027417096        
orbit_AscendingNode = 338.5348700644318
orbit_ArgOfPericenter =  136.8619206230844 
orbit_MeanAnomaly = 359.99999811984

(This is data for Stellarium 0.10.5.)

[edit] International Space Station

After version 0.10.3, Stellarium comes with the Satellites plugin which shows the positions of a number of artificial objects in Earth orbit, including the International Space Station.

For previous versions of Stellarium the ISS can be added as a Solar System object. This is strictly a workaround - Stellarium's orbital mechanics module is not designed specifically for satellite tracking. Satellites are small, (relatively) fast, and their orbits are influenced by a lot of factors and change over time, so orbit data should be updated periodically. The Satellites plugin downloads TLE lists from a website, but using the ssystem.ini to add satellites requires manual updates.

This forum thread contains a discussion on how to add the ISS to ssystem.ini:

• Feedback forum - Tracking the ISS (when copying code from the forum make sure to strip the spaces in the end of all lines)

[edit] See also

• the User's Guide
• JPL HORIZONS
• JPL/Horizons Parser for Stellarium, an on-line JavaSrcipt-based parser by Andreas Steinel that can use data for an solar system object from the JPL Horizons database to create an entry suitable for Stellarium's ssystem.ini.
• Small Bodies in Stellarium, a blog post describing how to add asteroids and comets to ssystem.ini using data from the NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics website