Thread: something to design a planetary system? or just a single planet w 2 moons?

A few possibilities here . . .

Do a google search for the following

1. StarGen (star system generator that gives lots of planetary information and has an online Beta for generating moons, but doesn't give any information about tidal effects)
Link : http://eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner...n/StarGen.html

2. Creating an Earthlike Planet (lots and lots of information here about creating planets around stars of various sizes, but, again, maybe not the amount of tidal information you're looking for)
Link : http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/worldkit/index.html

AstroSynthesis from NBOS software. I've got an older version that does enough for me, not sure what all the new version is capable of doing, but it should give you planetary surface temperatures and the like.
Link : http://nbos.com/

You could also look at ISDB (Internet Stellar Data Base). It has quite a bit of information about known stars in our galaxy and some good information regarding the existence of planets in binary systems and the like.
Link : http://www.stellar-database.com/

As far as the effects of one or more moons on tides and weather, you'll probably have to research that. I don't know of any software that handles that sort of thing, although, it may exist somewhere.

GW

many thanks! #2 was particularly useful and lead me to 'Geoff's Climate Cookbook' at http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/w...t/climate.html which i found most helpful for designing the climate based on issues like axial tilt and land mass sizes. great stuff!

still nothing on working out the tidal effects of the two moons but no worries, i'm infinitely further ahead now than i was before.

Theres been several threads about multi moon scenarios and whether they are stable, can the moons collide and tidal stuff. Depending on how accurate you need the data seems to give more and more complex techniques to get at it.

Designing detailed Astronomy?

Astrosynthesis orbital collision detection

I had started a program to do something like this, but eventually I fell behind on it. The goal had been to allow myself to accurately track positions and things like eclipses, etc.

Eventually I settled for using a program Greason Wolfe pointed me to: Here

After playing with this for awhile I got a number of moons that were fairly stable for several hundred years. (Slight wobble to their orbits.) I did this by using mostly light mass moons, the dense/heavy ones were stuck about the middle near where our actual moon is.

So, after I had that working, I just cheated. I calculated the period of each moon alone around the planet. Then I wrote a little python script to calculate the positions of the moons around the planets at a given time. I only want to use the world for maybe a few hundred years, and these numbers come out as close enough.

Originally Posted by Talroth

I had started a program to do something like this, but eventually I fell behind on it. The goal had been to allow myself to accurately track positions and things like eclipses, etc.

Eventually I settled for using a program Greason Wolfe pointed me to:

After playing with this for awhile I got a number of moons that were fairly stable for several hundred years. (Slight wobble to their orbits.) I did this by using mostly light mass moons, the dense/heavy ones were stuck about the middle near where our actual moon is.

So, after I had that working, I just cheated. I calculated the period of each moon alone around the planet. Then I wrote a little python script to calculate the positions of the moons around the planets at a given time. I only want to use the world for maybe a few hundred years, and these numbers come out as close enough.

Oh man, thanks for reminding me about that. After tossing it out there, I completely forgot to go grab it for myself.

GW

Edit : Looks like the link got dropped out of Talroth's post, so here it is again, just for ease of finding.

http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravit...cles/what.html