Nightfall
Astronomy for fun (education, science, whatever). Nightfall is an interactive application to simulate eclipsing binary stars, and to produce animated views, synthetic lightcurves and more. Takes into account the non-spherical shape of close binary stars, mutual reflection, and some other effects. Comes with documentation, on-line help, and lots of observational data of real binary stars. Supports the Gnome desktop, but doesn't require it.
| Tags | Scientific/Engineering Astronomy education |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases
- 04 Jun 2009 10:47
Changes: This release fixes a problem with recent versions of gnuplot that could cause Nightfall to hang indefinitely.
- 23 Jul 2008 13:19
Changes: This release adds the option to run in a substantially simplified mode, suitable for use in high school lab projects.
- 18 Jun 2007 13:32
Changes: This version fixes a bug in the configuration file parser that caused the disk to be switched on even if no disk was specified in the configuration file.
- 05 Jun 2007 14:58
Changes: This release fixes some bugs in the star-disk eclipse verification.
- 12 Apr 2007 07:52
Changes: This release adds the option to model an accretion disk. Minor numerical bugs have been fixed, and the "sqrt individual" limb darkening option has been removed, since it has no proper flux normalization, and hence yields incorrect results.
