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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.

For questions and comments open an issue on GitHub.

Find out more about how CurveSimulator works.

Getting started

1. Install the package, for example with "pip install curvesimulator".

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

3. Create a Python script with this code.

4. Download this example config file to the same directory as your Python script.

5. Run your script. If all went well, you have just generated your first video with CurveSimulator. If not contact me