Hi Mike,

Thanks for the info. I've tried Celestia but thought it might be too 
complex for my son.

Concerning PovRay: I have some experience already (I'm playing with it 
since version 2 or so, have modeled our house in it, did some artwork 
for some websites I made, etc). So I think I can come up with something, 
I was just wondering if somebody already did something close to this and 
I could work further based on that...

I'll have a look at Geogebra...

thanks again,
gert

On 2009-01-06 14:33, SharkD wrote:
> 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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