I am building an animated model of the solar system, where I would like to display the OrbitPath
s of the planets along with their Position
s at any one point in time. I would like to display the orbital paths as lines, just as they are given when inputting AstronomicalData["Earth", "OrbitPath"]
.
I'd like to display the positions as Sphere
s though. For some reason, even though I am combining the two graphical elements, only the spheres are displaying, and I cannot see the orbit lines at all. Would anyone be able to pinpoint what I am doing wrong in my code?
Animate[
Show[
Graphics3D[
AstronomicalData[#, "OrbitPath"] & /@ AstronomicalData["Planet"]],
Graphics3D[
Sphere[AstronomicalData[#, {"Position", DateList[x][[;; 3]]}] & /@
AstronomicalData["Planet"], 5*10^10]]
], {x, 1, 10000000000}, AnimationRate -> 100000000
]
For the record, I tried putting the graphics primitives in a single Graphics3D
and combining the spheres and lines into a single list of primitives, but that was throwing up too many problems so I figured this way would be more straightforward.
AstronomicalData["Venus", "OrbitPath"]
and compare it to the output ofAstronomicalData["Venus", "Position"]
you'll see that the former doesn't provide the actual path coordinates but some kind of scaled version with numbers differing orders of magnitude from the latter ones. $\endgroup$