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I would like to work with solar system planet orbits in a Geographic Information Software like QGIS, so:

Are available to download the orbits of solar system planets in some vector format?

EDIT:

Specifically, I would like to see planet orbits scaled to the size of a city, similar to the video below, but adding the planet orbits to a map in a tool like QGIS, to be able to play with scale, planets positions, etc..

Chris
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Pin
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1 Answers1

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There are a few different ways you can get this information, depending on exactly what you want.

Horizons is a good way to just get the relative positions of the planets. You can query it, download a set, and get the data you need via that tool pretty easily. If you have a limited range of time scales for this, that is probably your best bet.

If you want a more long term system, or more accurate, I suggest downloading the planet spice kernels and generating the data locally. There are a number of libraries which read SPICE kernels, I know of at least one for C and Python. Looking at it, it seems Fortran, IDL, Java, and Matlab are also options. You can read all about it at the NASA NAIF website, and get the kernels specifically from this page.

PearsonArtPhoto
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