I suppose to make this feasible they would have to up the size of the mirrors. Unless this is somehow dirt cheap I can't imagine farmers or solar operators buying this.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10...

Not mobile friendly

https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/

(Desktop Strongly recommended) https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/

Note that how the code is laid out you cant really simulate non-solar system masses. Its really aimed at massless objects in the solar system, your 3-body simulations are actually quite difficult to do given the design.

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

I'm working on modeling the motion of observed dust particles coming off of comet 67P, here is are some example 3d plots:

Example of rocks ejected from one position and their possible motions: https://dahlend.github.io/67p_beta_dust.html

Trying to determine possible orbits from a set of observations (the straight lines): https://dahlend.github.io/67p_dust_orbit.html

Shout out to pyvista for making these great 3d plots possible, a little less ergonomic than matplotlib, but it can export directly to html.

https://dahlend.github.io/2025_PN7_Orbit_1900-2100.png

Its hanging out for a while near us.

Shameless plug for my software I used compute it:

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45381647

Points: 3

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https://dahlend.github.io/the_belt.html

This includes about 1.3 million known asteroids (most of the known ones), so the page is like 45mb. Consider yourself warned.

This is a plot of semi major axis, orbital eccentricity, and inclination of the orbit. The blobs are collisional groups, where a bigger rock(s) got smashed into 'families' of asteroids. Color is by the absolute magnitude H, which is a normalized, log scaled, brightness measurement. Typically smaller H means larger object.

You can see the Kirkwood gaps clearly along one axis, but as you move around you can see more complex orbital resonances. These resonances pump energy into or out of the orbit of the asteroid, causing them to leave the resonance after some time, depleting the region of phase space.

Source: I do solar system simulations for my PhD work.

Also I fully agree with the "codes" rant.

Source: working professionally in the field for 4 years.

I began this project while I worked at Caltech on a NASA mission called NEO Surveyor (which is a space telescope designed to survey Near Earth Objects). It is being used by NEO Surveyor to predict previously known asteroids in images to reduce processing costs (since it is computationally expensive to process unknown asteroids). I wrote this generally enough that it is also being used by the SPHEREx and Roman space telescopes for a similar purpose.

I got it open sourced before I left caltech for a PhD, and I am continuing to develop it as a part of my PhD.

Here is a plot of my favorite group of asteroids, the Hildas, because of Jupiter their orbits are synchronized such that they make a triangle:

https://dahlend.github.io/kete/auto_examples/plot_mpc_state....

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45049612

Points: 7

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I also heavily use Jupyter for analysis, and with this code I can take over the telescope and command it in a jupyter session, allowing me to do live data analysis.

Here is a heavily used method in astronomy, this involves a higher order polynomial expansion than RK4.

This method has been extended a few times, my code uses a variation of it, and I know of several other projects which are also descended from it.

I have experienced the pain of getting ekos/kstars/indi tools to work well on my personal scope. If you want to try driving indi devices via python I have some python code (it's not super polished, but it does enough for my needs): https://github.com/dahlend/contindi

Source: Working on my PhD in orbital mechanics of asteroids/comets, here are my open source (python/rust) orbital integration tools: https://github.com/dahlend/kete

Biggest speed gain is that I have a custom SPICE reader that is multi-core friendly (I re-implemented a lot of the SPICE standard in rust), and it is used as the source for planet positions. Being able to skip planet integration leads to massive speedups.

It does an OK job for impactors, but the integrator is tuned heavily for performance, and the tolerance defaults are not great for impactors.

I match jpl horizons for apophis to a few km, they have a lot more intense earth gravitational model then I care to implement, and by default I only include the 5 heaviest main belt asteroids, they have many more. That was the sweet spot for accuracy vs speed for me, overall accuracy goal is less than a few km over a decade.

The goal is to be able to handle the huge influx of new asteroids that the catalog will have due to LSST and eventually NEO Surveyor (which I worked on for 3 years). Most systems I know have been throwing hardware at the problem, I tried to make fast and efficient enough software that we can use it on a laptop for 5-10 million asteroids.