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6

I would recommend MPA Garching's Gadget code for cosmological simulations of structure formation. It's primarily gravitational, but I do believe you can include gas effects as well: GADGET computes gravitational forces with a hierarchical tree algorithm (optionally in combination with a particle-mesh scheme for long-range gravitational forces) and ...

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Python is gaining popularity and replacing MATLAB in many fields of science as the tool for fast prototyping and writing research code. Have a look at http://www.astropy.org/ http://www.astropython.org/ https://python4astronomers.github.io/ http://www.astroml.org/ http://asteca.github.io/ for example. (I'm not working in astronomy as a researcher but ...

3

As an observational astronomer, most of your programming will be to perform data analysis, data exploration, and possibly image manipulation. Previously much of this was done with IDL, and the analysis pipelines for several/many/all(?) telescopes still rely on IDL. As GreenMatt points out though, IDL is on its way out. Since you have to buy a license to ...

3

I'm going to describe the steps that I followed to show 2004 BL86 in Stellarium in my notebook: Open the Configuration Window by pressing F2 Select the Plugins tab and from the left list select Solar System Editor Click in the configure button at the bottom Go to Solar System tab in the opened window Click the button Import orbital elements in MPC ...

2

Ok go on Stellarium then hover over the left side of the screen afterwards click on the location and select London, England (City Of London is the original walled city), then go and hover over the left side of the screen and select sky and viewing options and in the sky section and select the air pollution level from location database then it will ...

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Aladin is a good way to do visualization from multiple catalogs. MAST also offers a cross-mission search.

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Perhaps you are looking for the backup function File -> Backup... and to restore the settings File->Restore...

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Horizons Ephemeris generator can give you a planet's position and velocity vectors at a specified time. This is one set of possible options: Clicking Generate Ephemeris on that page will give you position and velocity vectors: Above the position and velocity vectors are the Julian date as well as the more conventional date. Wikipedia can give the ...

2

For computer software, the easiest way to take a sphere (and/or hemisphere) and flatten it into a flat shape (usually a rectangle) is the equi-rectangular projection (also known as the plate carrée), because it has the simplest formula relating pixels and coordinates: $x = w*\lambda/360 + w/2$ $y = -h*\phi/180 + h/2$ x and y is the pixel point w and h ...

2

This frustrated me as well when I first used the Tycho-2 catalog. Not finding a well known bright star can be disconcerting. Quoting from http://heasarc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/tycho2.html Supplement-1 (not part of this HEASARC database but available at ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/cats/I/259/suppl_1.dat.gz) lists stars from the Hipparcos and Tycho-1 ...

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This is really a computing problem, but I suppose the only point from an astronomical perspective is what the RA, Dec distributions of your catalogues look like. I'm not that familiar with optimal search techniques but I guess that you want roughly similar numbers of stars in each region. If your catalogue is just of the brightest stars, then these are ...

1

There are two things I can see in this code: First, the Julian date is measured from Midday, whereas the unix epoch is measured from midnight. jdn = 2440587.5 + when / (1000.0 * 3600 * 24) should be the correct expression. Secondly, alpha = atan(cos(epsilon * degtorad) * tan(lambda_ * degtorad)) calculates a right ascension in radians, you should convert ...

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Probably this is due to the fact that orbits of the Earth and Mars are inclined to the ecliptic differently so our viewing angle of the orbit of Mars changes slightly over the year. The program is probably showing the orbit of Mars projected onto the Celestial Plane as seen by us on the one specific date. Note, this is different from the ephemeris orbital ...

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In order to execute the compiled binaries, all libraries on which the executable depends must be in the correct location. In particular, the error specified in the question is due to the fact that my .moog folder was in ~/, my user home folder, rather than /, the root of my hard drive, as explained here. To solve the problem: cd mv .moog /.moog See this ...

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While I'm not doing so now, for a significant part of my career I worked as a programmer supporting scientists in in some fields that the general public would consider branches of astronomy. In that time I worked with (chronologically ordered in the sequence in which I first worked with them): Fortran - still useful because of its speed and existing code ...

1

What language are you writing this simulation in? Is it 2D or 3D? Do you only need positions and velocities for our solar system planets? I've done this exact thing (simulated the solar system in Fortran) and I didn't need exact initial positions, all I needed were initial radii (in AU from the Sun/centre of mass) and initial velocities. Use a random number ...

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