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CurveSimulator Documentation

CurveSimulator: A Star System and Lightcurve Simulator

CurveSimulator generates a video of the movements and eclipses of celestial bodies and the resulting lightcurve. The video simultanously displays a view of the star system from the top and from the side alongside the lightcurve of the system's total luminosity over time.

It takes just 2 lines of python code to produce the video.

In a configuration file, specify the physical properties of the stars and planets in your system. Also, provide some parameters of the video you want to make.

CurveSimulator is fast and the videos use little disk space. A video takes about the same time to produce as its playing time and uses less than 0.5 MB disc space per minute.

CurveSimulator uses ffmpeg to convert the data into a video. Download an executable version of ffmpeg from ffmpeg.org. Extract the downloaded zip file and (on Windows) add "yourdriveandpath\FFmpeg\bin" to the environment variable PATH.

For questions and comments open an issue on GitHub.

Find out more about how CurveSimulator works.