An Orrery for Rainmeter

[buckb]

Orrery is a Rainmeter skin that displays the positions of the planets in the solar system. At the heart of the skin is a Lua dofile called Planets.lua. This dofile is an implementation of the algorithm described in "Keplerian Elements for Approximate Positions of the Major Planets" by E M Standish of JPL/CalTech.

The Orrery skin is mostly an exercise in Lua scripting. The skin meters are driven from the Lua script rather than by data from Rainmeter measures. There are two variants of the skin: Simple.ini and Orrery.ini. The Simple.ini variant demonstrates how to use Planets.lua. The Orrery.ini variant started life as a prettier version of Simple.ini, but I got a bit carried away.

I don't intend to support the skin and don't want to lead users to believe otherwise. Rather, I just wanted to publish some code that others might find useful. There is a readme included with the skin that describes how to configure the skin and control it at runtime.

Apologies in advance if I don't find the time to reply to comments and questions, but I'll try.

Many thanks to the Rainmeter developers. I've really enjoyed working with your software. Thanks to jsmorely for all the examples and user support. And thanks to the many contributors to the forum: Smurfier, Mordasius, Stone, SilverAzide, balala, and eclectic-tech to name a few.

Orrery.jpg

--buckb

[Mordasius]

Nice work. Now if only there was a little moon orbiting planet earth......

[jsmorley]

Where is the Tesla?

[fonpaolo]

Where is the Tesla?

Too small to be represented?

[balala]

MANY CONGRATULATIONS buckb, for this excelent piece of software. I don't name it skin, because it is beyond that.

I saw a few skins previously, which were downloading this kind of information from internet, but never saw one, making all such calculations locally. That's why I consider this skin (calling it so, even if previously I said it's more than a skin) an excellent work.
I previously tried once to write something similar, but my skin calculated just the Sun/Moon rise/set, it was a weak work, besides this one.

Just one single thing I'd like to mention: the one tenth of second update is too low in my opinion. Instead of the initially used Update=100 ([Rainmeter] sections) in both skins, I think even the default Update=1000 is too low. For such skins it's not needed, because the changes are happening even more slower, so, I'd increase the Update, probably up to even 10000 (10 seconds) - especially in the Orrery.ini.

SO AGAIN buckb, CONGRATULATIONS AND KEEP WORKING ON THIS SKIN, TO FURTHER IMPROVE IT. YOU WAS GREAT!!!

[buckb]

Wasn't that Falcon Heavy launch amazing? I am so glad SpaceX is streaming their launches. Elon Musk is quite the showman.

Mordasius:
I hadn't done any astronomical programming before I stumbled across some of your skins and their amazing graphics. I saw a thread between you and Stone talking about calculating Moon rise and set times. I got interested...


balala:
Thank you for your kind words. I feel a bit guilty regarding this skin. The whole point of Rainmeter is to make skins easy to build with only minimal programming. Yet this skin is overflowing with Lua.

I use Update=100 so that the Orrery animates smoothly when running in "time-lapse" mode. The script's Update function throttles back on redraws when possible, such as when the Orrery is in Realtime mode. When running in Realtime, redraws only occur every 10 updates. And when the Orrery is paused, redraws are skipped altogether.

[balala]

I feel a bit guilty regarding this skin. The whole point of Rainmeter is to make skins easy to build with only minimal programming. Yet this skin is overflowing with Lua.

Don't have to feel guilty. Those kind of calculation as you made in the lua code, can't be made in Rainmeter, I think.

[eclectic-tech]

: Very Nicely Done! :

[SilverAzide]

Excellent job!

[buckb]

Thank you, eclectic-tech and SilverAzide.