Simple Astronomy Animations

A collection of astronomy animations produced for my intro astronomy classes. These are all written in python (using matplotlib) and the videos are rendered using FFmpeg.

• Earth/Moon Motion : demonstrations of the orbit and phases of the moon and Earth’s seasons.

• Ellipses : animations showing the properties of ellipses

• Orbits : demonstrations of different orbits a satellite can make around Earth.

• Solar System Motion : Kepler’s laws, parallax, retrograde motion, and more

• Binary Systems / Exoplanets : properties of binary star systems and exoplanet systems

• Thermodynamics and Radiation : blackbody spectrum, random walk, thermal motion

• Waves : properties of waves, including Doppler effect

• Nuclear Physics : nuclear physics concepts

Note

All the source code for these animations is available on github: zingale/astro_animations

Note

Videos are rendered with ffmpeg using:

ffmpeg -framerate 15 -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i "*.png" -vcodec mpeg4 -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart movie.mp4