Orbit Animations¶
Tutorials on turning MPC orbit data into animations — how to simulate the motion, how to choose a frame of reference that makes the physics visible, and how to render the result as video for the web. Each tutorial notebook produces the stand-alone animations shown below it.
These build on the simpler, static tutorials in Working with Orbits — fetching an orbit from the MPC, integrating it with REBOUND and ASSIST, and plotting it — so start there if those steps are new to you.
Minimoons: Earth's temporarily captured asteroids¶
Three real minimoons, simulated with ASSIST from their MPC orbits and drawn in the frame co-rotating with the Sun–Earth line: Earth at the centre, the Moon and its orbit, Earth's Hill sphere with the L1 and L2 gateways, and the object's path growing with time; beside it, the object's distance from Earth against date, with the gravitationally bound interval shaded. Produced by the minimoon animation tutorial.
2006 RH120 — a temporarily captured orbiter (2006–2007)¶
2020 CD3 — captured unseen in 2017, discovered in 2020¶
2024 PT5 — a two-month fly-through (2024)¶
2006 RH120 seen from the Sun¶
The same capture in heliocentric coordinates with the axes fixed in space. The camera starts on the whole orbit, glides in to follow Earth as the asteroid catches up, holds through the bound phase — where the loops trace a slowly turning rosette — and pulls back out after the release.
Related static tutorials in Working with Orbits:
- From MPC Orbit to Ephemeris-Quality Integration with ASSIST (the integration set-up used here)
- From MPC Orbit to N-Body Simulation,
- Earth's Co-orbital Companions (the same rotating frame, for horseshoe and quasi-satellite orbits), and
- Reference Frames for Solar System Dynamics.