Open Online Orrery - In Progress

BComp Dissertation (CP4101) or more commonly referred to as Final Year Project at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore under the supervision of Prof. Martin Henz.

Work on this project began in Aug 2023, to be concluded by May 2024.

Existing problem

There's a surprising lack of an accurate open-source online library for computing and visualising celestial motion. None so that can be easily used for educational purposes in either introductory level physics or programming courses.

So what?

Inspired by the wonderful jsOrrery project from Martin Vézina, the goal is to

Build a library/module with well documented API that allows users to compute, simulate and visualize accurate interactions and phenomena of the astronomical scale, possibly including at extreme conditions such as near black holes, while providing educational and experiential learning opportunities through direct interaction with code and configuration.

• compute - offer choice of various integration methods (of varying speed and accuracy) including the ability to pass custom integration methods in the form of higher order functions
• visualize - using plotly, unity_academy, etc to enable a compelling visual system with free moving/mountable cameras/POV
• accurate - use appropriate methods at various scales to auto-correct/counter compounding computational inaccuracies
• extreme conditions - such as near black holes
• interaction - be able to see and edit the code, setup and configuration to understand and visualize the effects

The idea is to then make this library integrated and available in the Source Academy environment to enable experiential learning of physics and coding.

How is it looking now?

For the initial research phase of the project, I took a deeper dive into some of the physics modelling challenges and integration methods required for the discrete simulation.

Following that, I spent time designing the library to be as open to extension and customisation as possible. This included setting up library methods that users can use or pass in custom integration methods or force equations by following set interfaces.

As I continue to work on the prototype, I will try to regularly update this page with new and interesting updates.

Ingredients

• Typescript - Typed superset of Javascript
• Plotly.js - High-level, declarative charting library for web applications
• three.js - Cross-browser JavaScript library for animation and visualisation, using WebGL