Hello all,

First of all, my best wishes to all of you. And to the developers of 
PovRay: keep up the good work; we're all grateful for the job you're doing.

My 5-year old son is very interested and intrigued by the interplay of 
the sun/earth/moon and how this creates day, night, seasons, ... Also 
the mechanism of a solar and lunar eclipse (who is casting a shadown on 
who) has caught his attention.

Since I lack a mechanical model of this three body system (I remember we 
had this in our geography classroom when I was in secondary school: you 
could turn a handle and then by means of gears the bodies would rotate 
and move), I was planning to do some animations with PovRay.

I don't want to re-invent the wheel, hence my question: is there anybody 
here who has done something similar with PovRay? I would like to end up 
with a small number of input files (or a single one) for which the clock 
variable would both make the bodies rotate and move the camera to show 
the different aspects (night/day, eclipse,...). Do you know of a site or 
reference work where I could get approximate data (good enough for this 
purpose of an educational animation) for the astronomy data?

Thanks for your tips!

bye,
gert

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