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The goal would be an animated, variable-speed, 2-D view from celestial north of the Sun and planets. A stretch goal would be showing photorealistic rotations of CelestialBodys as a function of time.

I have been using SPICE and have the ephemeris files that (I think) GMAT will need.

Which tutorials are most on-topic for such a project? There seem to be a lot. I've found OrbitView but there's mention that it's deprecated in favor of OpenFrames.

Answers which don't exactly address that question but which do bear on the project will be welcome.

An ominous cow word
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    If the goal is just an animation then I would not use GMAT. GMAT is meant for mission analysis and is limited in the visuals it can create. If you have SPICE interfaced with a different medium (C/C++, Python, etc.) then you would be better off creating your own animations. Here are some animations I made about Mars2020 using SPICE and a different medium (MATLAB). – BrendanLuke15 Nov 01 '22 at 00:19
  • You have a few questions in there. Stack Exchange works better if you focus on one per post. In your case, questions 1 and 2 are subjective, 3 is a bit hit and miss, 4 is a GMAT implementation specific question and 5 may be opinion-based – Rory Alsop Nov 01 '22 at 14:13
  • For an animation, you really don't need the high accuracy ephemeris since you're limited to the resolution of the user's screen. Here's an implementation of a simpler ephemeris: https://www.celestialprogramming.com/planets_with_keplers_equation.html – Greg Miller Nov 02 '22 at 02:27
  • Thanks to all. Indeed, it turned out that Matlab was the easiest way to visualize the results. For anyone who discovers this thread years down the road, the relevant thing is a Matlab "comet plot", and to go through their file exchange for scripts to do multiple comet plots in one figure. There are several, I wound up with one called multicomet.m. – An ominous cow word Nov 11 '22 at 18:20

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