Generate animated solar system timelapse videos for any date range
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A fork of Solar System Live that generates animated videos showing planetary orbits over any date range. Tracks orbital statistics (how many times Earth was lapped by Mercury/Venus, or lapped outer planets) and overlays dates/ages on each frame.Example: Einstein's lifetime (1879-1955) showing 76 years of solar system evolution. Built with Python + Pillow + ffmpeg, runs locally with Lighttpd.https://github.com/simondorfman/solar_system_live
HN · launched Jan 21, 2026 · 10 upvotes (top 50%) · 0 views
Niche: data and scientific visualization tools · 146 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 146 launches in data and scientific visualization tools →
Could you build this?
Yes Calculating Keplerian orbital mechanics from known ephemeris data and rendering them via HTML Canvas or ffmpeg into an animated video timelapse is straightforward math and scripting.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 166 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #71 of 167 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 72 days after the earliest competitor.
- The Celestialer's Orrery · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Faraway · hn · 2026-11-11 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Space on Live · ph · 2026-10-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- SOLAR · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Gravity · hn · 2026-06-09 · 217 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Meteor shower, planet alignment, eclipse kit · hn · 2026-08-12 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites · hn · 2026-09-29 · 405 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Earth-clock · hn · 2026-07-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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