# How do I plot orbit planets and satellites?

I need to find the way to plot orbit planets and satellites in a coherent way. Let's say I want to generate a chart of the Moon's orbit around the Earth, or the jovian satellites around Jupiter.

The hard way would be the use of a CAD software, manually. However, I'm not sure if I will be able to represent the orbits excentricity. And it would be a slow process, one by one...

My idea is to do it programmatically and recursively, so I can generate hundreds of charts for my articles. Can AstroPy do it? I'm using Debian 9 and I checked poliastro, but I had problems with the requirements... I also checked Xephem, and I could not compile it (it's too old, I think). Could Celestia or Kstars do that?

Any Linux/Unix tool would be fine! Especially if it works from the command line.

EDIT: I tried to compile ORSA without luck. Also failed.

I'm discovering the combo of python3-ephem with gnuplot. I can generate the data with Ephem and plot it with Gnuplot. What do you think about this combo?

EDIT 2:

Not only python3-ephem... Skyfield and REBOUND are good options!

• Most of the answers will somewhat depend on how you want to see the orbits plotted. Anyhow, have a look at Stellarium. – planetmaker Aug 13 '20 at 8:47
• Skyfield can give you specific data on our solar system and has a Kepler solver module that can generate orbits based on Keplerian elements. Blender can also generate 3D rendered or simply illustrated views of anything and can be scripted from Python and even run programmatically/automatically as a Python module without running the GIU if you like and it even has its own Stack Exchange site! Are these kinds of things along the lines of what you need? If so I can write up a short answer. – uhoh Aug 13 '20 at 9:17
• – uhoh Aug 13 '20 at 9:19
• @uhoh, yeah, Skyfield looks nice. I'm gonna take a look at it, firstly. This other answer you link here has a lot of tools. Now what I need is time to check them. Thanks a lot! – Astrogeek Aug 13 '20 at 9:48
• I would reccomend, REBOUND for Python. It is very intuitive when you do a few tutorials. As an example it allowed me to plot this: youtube.com/watch?v=BWAIq5gi198 – Swike Aug 13 '20 at 11:38