You might want to try Celestia, a real-time planetarium program. 
Certainly, you can do the same things in POV-Ray, but there are several 
caveats:

1) POV-Ray is not a real-time program. You can't preview changes or 
interact with the scene in real-time. The best you can do is render 
individual frames to create a movie--which can be a time consuming 
process, and you'll have to start the process over from the beginning 
each time you make a mistake.
2) POV-Ray can suffer from floating point/rounding errors when the 
objects get too large and/or too distant.
3) POV-Ray takes a long time to master, in general; and creating scenes 
is usually a laborious process.

You could also try GeoGebra, which is a real-time dynamic geometry 
software. You could create representations of the planets as well as the 
shadows they cast on other bodies using geometric objects. This program 
is limited, however, to two dimensions.

Hope that helps.

-Mike

gvdeynde wrote:
> 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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