Last updated on 2000-04-25 at 11:25 GMT
This page is about stars, planets, and in particular programs to generate simulations of them.
One of the oldest solar system generators (if not the earliest for microcomputers) was written by Matt Burdick in 1988. Several people since then have used his starform program as a jumping-off point to make their own generators, and I'm no exception. Below are some of the variants I've collected or written.
A note on file formats: for several of the links below you will find both .tgz and .zip files. The former are Unix standard format tar(1) archives compressed with gzip(1) and so contain all of the Unix file attributes. The latter are archived with the InfoZip package (compatible with PKZIP) and are suitable for MSDOS (with a suitable C/C++ compiler, I recommend DJGPP which is a port of the GNU C/C++ compiler for DOS). Remember to make sure that the file is downloaded - Netscape, for instance, will try to read a .tgz file as text and display it unless you hold down SHIFT while clicking on the link. This is very messy and annoying (I do it often when using Netscape beacuse I forget), and simply saving the file after it's been displayed doesn't usually write a file which can be unpacked again.
|
starform.tgz starform.zip |
This is Matt Burdick's original Starform code, hacked about by me with additions for atmospheric composition (see the README file for details, and the EXAMPLE file for sample output). |
| accrdole.zip | A version by Andrew Folkins, based more closely on Dole's original paper (but more CPU intensive) and modified to ANSI(ish) C by me. I've hacked it about, removing some of his optimisations (modern processors don't have any problem with the time it takes, it's well under a second now on any Pentium) to get back nearer to the original. I've also added gas accretion for normal planets to give some sort of atmosphere, it seems to work reasonably. The output formats are (of course) totally different from starform. |
|
doleplus.tgz
doleplus.zip |
This is Andrew Folkins' code again, but converted
to C++. It's even more hacked about, therefore, and
will be the basis of any further development I do on
this code. It needs my XLIB library
to link and run.
*** Now converted to MKS, all values in SI units *** *** Planets and moons in vectors rather than lists *** |
|
evolve.tgz evolve.zip |
My own ideas on calculating the evolution of atmosphere etc. on a planet. At the moment it's only a calculation of max/min temperatures, but it seems to fit the Earth and Moon quite well. |
Note that some of these programs need external libraries to link.
The following table lists the current versions of the files mentioned above, to enable checking what has changed. Note that dates are in ISO 8601 format, YYYY-MM-DD, and times are in UT (GMT as it used to be called). File sizes are in bytes.
| File name | Size | Date/Time |
|---|---|---|
| accrdole.zip | 18347 | 1999-04-25 18:10 |
| doleplus.tgz | 104039 | 2000-02-22 16:27 |
| doleplus.zip | 123871 | 2000-02-22 16:27 |
| evolve.tgz | 36670 | 1999-11-23 17:26 |
| evolve.zip | 57884 | 1999-11-23 17:26 |
| starform.tgz | 33980 | 2000-01-10 11:57 |
| starform.zip | 41624 | 2000-01-10 11:57 |
| File name | Size | Date/Time |
|---|---|---|
| xlib.tgz | 306510 | 2000-04-19 07:39 |
| xlib.zip | 459752 | 2000-04-19 07:39 |
I now have copies of the original Fogg and Dole articles, curtesy of the British museum through their reprint service, Lexicon.
This site is mirrored at http://www.keris.demon.co.uk/, http://www.firedrake.org/keris/ and can also be accessed by ftp at ftp://ftp.firedrake.org/keris
Some random links to vaguely related stuff, extracted from my bookmarks file:
Kirchhoff's
Laws and Stellar Spectra
Free
Virtual Galaxy Project
Captain
Barcode's War Room
Accrete
(several implementations, including Java executable)
'Interactions
of an accretion disk with a protoplanetary companion'
Star
Generator
World
Building
Chemical Elements.com
Periodic
Table of the Elements
Yogi's
Behemoth Periodic Table of Elements
Chemicool
periodic table
Physical
Chemistry
Dew Point
Measurement
Weather
Calculator
physical
constants and conversions
Planetary
fact sheets (NASA)
The
Calendar FAQ
Times
of the Earth's Perihelion and Aphelion 1992-2005
Software
for Positional Astronomy
If you have comments or want to contact me, my preferred email address for Internet mail is chris@keris.demon.co.uk
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