title: Solar system computer model
body: <p>I'm interested in building a 3D model of our solar system for web use (probably with AS3 and papervision) and have been looking into how I would go about encoding the planetary positions. My idea was to download the already calculated positions from NASA as calculating the positions myself seems a but overcomplicated. I'm not sure though whether I should use a helio centric or an earth centric encoding.</p>
  
  <p>I wanted to know if there are any one with any experience in this. Which approach would be better? The NASA JPL website seems to have the positions of all the major bodies in our solar system as earth centric. I can see this becoming a problem later on though when adding Voyager and Mars Lander missions to the model?</p>
  
  <p>Any feedback, comments and links are very welcome.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> I have a rough model running that uses heliocentric coordinates, but I haven't been able to find the coordinates for all planets in this format.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I don't have a lot of detail to provide for know because I really don't know what I'm doing (from the space point of view). I wanted to get a handle on 3D programming, and am interested in space. The idea was that I would make a rough solar system simulator with at first all the planets and their orbiters (maybe excluding satellites at first). Perhaps include a news aggregator and some links to news/resources and so on. The general idea would be to allow people to click around and get super excited about going to the moon and Mars (for a starter).</p>
  
  <p>In the long run I hopefully would be able to add in satellites and the moon missions (scroll back in time to the 70's and see the moon missions).</p>
  
  <p>So to answer Arrieta's question the idea was not to calculate eclipses but to build an easy to approach, interactive space exploratorium, and learn some 3D and space related stuff on the way.</p>