An Orrery for Rainmeter

[buckb]

First post updated with latest version of the skin.

Reworked Heliocentric and Geocentric display modes.
Added precession to the planets.

[SilverAzide]

This is so cool... It's great to see a fun "toy" like Rainmeter turned into an actual educational tool that shows you how the solar system works. It's one thing to read about Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler in some dusty history book (assuming schools even teach this stuff anymore), another to see their ideas in action. And to think those guys figured out all this stuff using nothing more than hand-made telescopes and sextants... and they had to write out their Lua scripts with a quill pen!

More fun with orreries: Geocentric Tellurion by Mordasius, and Steampunk Orrery and Clock by yereverluvinuncleber.

[buckb]

First post updated with latest version of the skin.

Added location configuration via text file.
Added adjustment for Dynamical Time.
Added new StarMap mode.

[sl23]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing

[Yincognito]

Wow, it looks nice (and probably accurate as well) - well done! Just saw this now, but if I had seen this earlier, maybe I would have avoided writing a somewhat similar (yet a bit different) solar system "simulator" a while ago. I didn't regret working on that, as you probably don't regret working on your skin, as it improved my knowledge on these astronomical things.

Again, excellent work - much better than mine!

[sl23]

Just saw this now

Thanks to me!

[Yincognito]

Thanks to me!

Indeed - well, partially at least.
I was not stalking you or anything, just checked the "New Posts" forum option - something I rarely do, to be honest - and (this is where you played a part, yes) took advantage of your recent reply to add my appreciation to this too. Thanks for giving me the chance, by the way, but make no mistake, I personally still prefer my skin. It may not look as complete, featured and polished as this one (similarly, it was only meant to be an exercise in native Rainmeter and not to be released as a fully fledged skin), but I put a LOT of effort into it, and one of the things I aimed to achieve there (i.e. size and distance proportionality, just like in reality) is something I'm proud of. Too bad Rainmeter cracks on such huge meter animations...

P.S. Slightly off topic, I recommend Celestia for astronomy lovers. It's a free and quite accurate piece of software.

[buckb]

First post updated with latest versions.

The original Orrery skin has been split into three separate skins: Orrey, SkyView, and StarMap.
The new skins support scaling.

Enabling Hardware Acceleration in Rainmeter is strongly recommended.
Please see readme.txt for configuration and operation details.