AstroGrav is a full-featured, high precision solar system simulator that calculates the gravitational interactions between all astronomical bodies, so that the motions of asteroids and comets are simulated much more accurately than with planetarium applications. The effects of general relativity and radiation pressure can be taken into account, and superb interactive 3D viewing allows you to easily rotate and zoom your view while the solar system evolves.
The AstroGrav software has a huge range of features and viewing options, including views from space or any object, planetarium-style views from any location on Earth, multiple views animated simultaneously, dynamically calculated orbits and trajectories, comprehensive tabular data, and simulation time steps from a fraction of a second to thousands of years. Constellations and over 100,000 background stars are included, with comprehensive data for every star. Several different celestial coordinate grids and a wide range of physical units are available, and editing facilities allow you to create new objects manually, or import from hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets.
Because it calculates the motions of bodies from their gravitational interactions, AstroGrav is not restricted to just the solar system. Any situation in which gravity is the only significant force can be simulated, and the illustrative sample files that are included with AstroGrav include many examples such as exoplanet systems, protoplanets that evolve into planetary systems, rubble piles and their interactions with massive bodies, complex star systems, and even projectiles and bouncing balls.
AstroGrav is ideal for astronomers, astrophysicists, researchers, teachers, educationalists, and students, and comes complete with a tutorial and full documentation.
v3.0 [Oct 25, 2014]
Version 3.0.6 - 24th June 2015
Version 3.0.6 of AstroGrav is an upgrade containing minor improvements and bug fixes. This information is intended for existing users who are already familiar with AstroGrav and want to quickly find out about the main changes. This is a free upgrade for customers who have already purchased an AstroGrav 2 or AstroGrav 3 license, so that all you need to do is download Version 3.0.6 and use it in place of your old version. If you have any problems with this new version, please don't hesitate to contact us so that we can help you out.
Version 3.0.6 of AstroGrav has the following new and improved features.
Evolution Improvements
Other Improvements
Evolution Improvements
Version 3.0.6 of AstroGrav includes the following improvements to the evolution algorithm.
Evolution has been greatly speeded up in cases where small time steps are being used.
Evolution performance has been improved in most simulations.
A bug has been fixed that caused AstroGrav to crash when evolving a large number of overlapping objects with bouncing collisions.
Several other minor improvements have been made to the handling of bouncing collisions.
Other Improvements
Version 3.0.6 of AstroGrav also has many other minor improvements and bug fixes, including the following.
A bug has been fixed that caused an unwanted automatic change to the fixed point after accepting a 'Do you want to detach your viewpoint?' question in a view window.
A memory leak has been fixed that could cause AstroGrav to run short of memory after starting and stopping evolution a very large number of times.
