AstroGrav 5.1 Released for Windows and Mac

AstroGrav adds many new features and improvements to its precision solar system simulator

8th April 2024 - AstroGrav 5.1 includes significant new facilities for importing co-orbital asteroids and Earth satellites into solar system simulations. View windows have been improved by allowing the specification of exactly what object data and track data to display, and there are many other improvements and bug fixes. Full details are available from:

Importing Asteroids

Asteroid tables can now be filtered to show only the co-orbital asteroids that are associated with a particular planet. After being imported into a simulation, the simulation can be evolved to study the behavior of each asteroid, and to determine whether it is a Trojan, horseshoe, or transition asteroid.

Importing Earth Satellites

There is now a simple way of adding Earth satellites to a simulation. Standard two- or three-line elements for a satellite can be copied from any source, such as CelesTrak, and then pasted into AstroGrav to import the satellite into the simulation. Entire batches of two- or three-line elements can also be copied and pasted to import multiple satellites all at once.

View Window Improvements

Displaying an object's data in a view window used to always show the distance, velocity, magnitude, and phase. It's now possible to specify which of those you want to show, and which you want to hide, with the angular diameter and phase angle added to the list too. Track labels used to be shown in a long form such as '2024 May 15, 12:35:00.000', but can now be shown in several shorter forms, such as 'May 15' or '12:35', eliminating the items that are the same on every label. There is also a new 'Turn around' command that rotates your viewpoint by 180 degrees.

Other Improvements

Searching for background stars has been made more flexible by accepting verbose search strings such as 'Hipparcos 37442' and 'Tycho 1373-1766-1'. When specifying a new family of objects to add to a simulation, the true longitude has been replaced with the much more useful mean longitude, and a bug has been fixed that made it impossible to generate an ephemeris from another planet if the Earth was missing from the simulation. The Mac version now runs natively on Apple processors, instead of requiring Rosetta 2, and many other minor improvements and bug fixes complete this major upgrade.

Upgrade

The AstroGrav 5.1 update is free of charge, and may be downloaded and installed immediately from:

About AstroGrav Astronomy Software

AstroGrav Astronomy Software produces astronomical and gravity simulation software for astronomers, researchers, educationalists, and students. For more information, visit the company's website:

Press Contact:
Russell Calvert
AstroGrav Astronomy Software
russcalvert@astrograv.co.uk

Links