Looking for a very very simple planet plotting program

[Keatah]

Among all the sophisticated wares like Stellarium and Orbiter and Celestia.. I'm looking for a very simple orbiter plotting program. Like the ones they used to show in the kids textbooks.

A top-down view with the sun in the center and all the orbits of the 9 planets drawn as simple circles, with the planets positioned wherever they should based on the time and date. A basic, simple 2-D plot of the solar system.

Any programs that will do this? No on-line stuff like the one from JPL -- Horizons, isn't it? I want something I can download use totally off-line.

[Izack]

IMFD Map Program.

[Keatah]

Ooops I mis-typed. I should have said outside of orbiter. And not necessarily to be used for navigation/plotting for Orbiter.

[Gumok]

On PhET JAVA simulations is this simple applet. It doesn't have the whole solar system but only Sun, Earth, Moon and ISS. Simple and fast...

http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulati...ity-and-orbits

If you want these simulations to run offline, you can download the whole site with all simulations (http://phet.colorado.edu/en/get-phet/full-install).

[N_Molson]

Quote:

the orbits of the 9 planets

You mean of the 8 planets ?

[garyw]

http://www.heavens-above.com/ does an 'overhead sky view' and will show where the planets are - all nine of them. (Ok, I have a soft spot for little pluto).

[Ripley]

There are Astroviewer and Sky View Cafè, too (both java based).
I think they offer a downloadable standalone version.

http://www.astroviewer.com/index.php
http://www.skyviewcafe.com/

[TMac3000]

Skyglobe

[Ripley]

Skyglobe!
My first ever pc planetarium for...Windows '98!!

[Keatah]

Quote:

Originally Posted by N_Molson

 You mean of the 8 planets ?

No, I mean 9 planets.

---------- Post added at 08:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:33 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ripley

 Skyglobe!
My first ever pc planetarium for...Windows '98!!

OHHHH GOD!!! YES!!!
This was also my first planetarium program for the PC as well. Discounting the stuff I'd run on my Apple II. But that wasn't anything remotely as beautiful as SkyGlobe. I remember fumbling through DOS getting it running on my 80486. This was pre-windows.

In celebration, I thought I'd run this on my i7 machine for old times sake.

---------- Post added at 09:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:30 PM ----------

Furthermore -- http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ -- is kind of nice. Supposedly this might become available for download and open-source too. Any info on it?

[Ripley]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ripley

 Skyglobe!
My first ever pc planetarium for...Windows '98!!

No, wait, I was wrong!!
I remade my time-machine calculations.

I discovered Skyglobe in one of my work pcs where we had...Windows 3.1!!! The one which you would run launching "win.exe" from DOS prompt.

[Ripley]

Just found these other ones, downloadable as well.

http://www.solarsystemscope.com/ (includes Pluto!)

http://www.sunaeon.com/#/solarsystem/ (better model)

http://www.sunmoonscope.com/ (only Sun & Moon)

http://jrgraphix.net/research/flash_sol.php (Flash5)

[Keatah]

Ok. Those would be good enough. But I can't run them on the system I need to run them on due to some issue with having to update a flash player. I'm not going to do that.

And while looking around for videos of those to see what they were, I found this video --

Interactive 3D Solar System Simulation -free download - YouTube

Interactive 3D Solar System Simulation -free download - YouTube

-- which would be absolutely perfect, but the frakking download link is dead. Typical BS of the internet when you get into extensive searches. The more you dig the more crap you come up with -- http://www.freesoftwaretools.net/cat...l-solar-system

So if there is a link to it that is working - everything would be absolutely stellar!

I can use Celestia, and zoom out, but I lose sight of the inner planets.. But that's besides the point. Celestia is way "too much" for what I'm doing.