Expanding Solar System Simulator

After almost 15 hours I FINALLY have a working simulation of every single solar system we know of so far! Honestly the last hour was the most GRUESOME because I faced sooo many errors when trying to deploy to web I had to change a lot of stuff in code but here we are! You can run this in the web or locally on your computer and you can also edit the project to use other exoplanet catalogues, such as NASA’s Exoplanet Archive. When the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope stars sending us back data, I will definitely be looking forward to upgrading this project!!

I finally have a working simulation of every single solar system discovered according to the Open Exoplanet Catalogue, a project I did in honor of the successful launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope! I need to deploy it on the web now which honestly is the biggest headache I’ve had in coding why is pygame like this… anyway, I also had to download the data in an xml file instead of retrieving it from github because of pygame complications bla bla bla but im SO CLOSE to finally deploying this project and moving on to the next. Key features include browsing and filtering through all solar systems (and checking out ours) and then clicking on one and watching a real physics simulation of planets orbiting their star take place. interesting way of seeing the scale of our universe maybe? Its currently 1am and I kinda broke the code (again) so I will show final results with simulations and everything tomorrow, here are my beautiful errors till now.

I’m finally heading towards a SUPER exciting part. So now whenever you press on a planet you get some basic info about it retrieved from the solar system Open Data API as shown below. After taking care of that, I did some research on some APIs because I want to make a simulation of EVERY solar system known so far (and make the simulation update according to new discoveries). Of course my first choice was NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, but apparently they’re updating it or something and the links weren’t even opening so I opted for the Open Exoplanet Catalogue which is just as amazing! You can check it out here you don’t even need an API key: https://github.com/OpenExoplanetCatalogue/open_exoplanet_catalogue/tree/master . Tomorrow I will incorporate a search bar and allow users to explore other solar systems. It’s not going to look super pretty or stunningly 3D but it will be simulations of real solar systems with actual facts and that’s what matters!

Fixed the laggy orbits and now you get images of the planets orbiting the sun instead of just colored circles! This was actually just a stupid mistake with the frames when I was half awake. ANDD… I incorporated the OpenData Solar System API!! Now, everytime you press on any object, it’s going to print its info in the terminal. Next time, I will make it display a screen with selected info.

I accidentally broke it partially by trying to render images for planets instead of circles which made the orbits extremely laggy. I mean I was also coding while barely being able to keep my eyes open so either I’ll fix this or drop the idea. On the bright side, I did find a great free API to upload some info about the planets and other celestial objects to my simulator. I have this idea of making like a dashboard where you can visit many actual solar systems other than ours!

You can now adjust the timeframe to your liking and I added Pluto! Now I’m really starting to get the hang of this (at least for this project) and I’m having so much fun adding customizable features. I think next time instead of just circles I’ll render an image of each planet and integrate an API to get the current weather data for each. stay tuned!

Added all the planets and created a zoom in and zoom out functionality, enabling users to see the distant gas giants and their orbits at proportional scale.

A very basic model completed! So I got the first 4 planets to move around the sun. Now, this was a beginner’s kind of project, so now I want to make it my own. I added a title and the Moon moving around the Earth (which doesn’t exactly look great). Next, I want to add the entire SOLAR SYSTEM (or at least as much as I can of it). I’m going to create some in and out zooming panels, the moons of other planets and I really want to implement some NASA api in some way

Starting with the first 4 planets! So I’m a bit new to pygame (and it’s been a while since my last python project) so for the first step of this project I learned how pygame works through a youtube vid and set up the first four planets, once I get comfortable with it I’ll move solo. This simulation uses real physics and I plan on connecting NASA apis, moons and overlooked objects of our solar system and make it like a museum.