I'm trying to simulate moon orbit around earth, my moon is broken.

[xzbobzx]

Enjoyed playing with this, even though I just noticed I was a little too late !

Ah well, no worries! Thanks anyway :D

I toyed around with my moon and set the initial position and speed to the moon's perigee and max velocity: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.html

Ran it like that and I got a very neat eclipse orbit with it's apogee nearly exactly at where our moon's actual apogee is.

Now to start coding my moon ship so I can get a Hohmann transfer underway!

Is excel this powerful? I though it's something accountants use for their work. -_-

It's got a whole programming language under the hood that can be utilized. Of course, it's not the best qua performance to run an astrophysics simulation, but Excel's all we have at school, and it works perfectly fine!

 

[Borek]

You want to update the vx and vy using the * timestep too !

He did, read the code again.

 

[BvU]

He did, read the code again.

You're right. I had moved the *timestep down to the vx, vy expression to keep dimension of a in lline with naming and also to get the right values for ax, ay, am in the table. In fact, now I start wondering if the expression for px, py improves if 0.5 * timestep is used instead of *timestep...

 

[BvU]

Is excel this powerful? I though it's something accountants use for their work. -_-

Excel on its own is already extremely powerful. With VBA as programming language with quite some object orientation is powerful squared.

Biggest drawback is that in practice it is the epitome of unstructured programming, so re-use and knowledge transfer are disaster areas.

Having said that, there's an awful lot of science and technology it can be (and is) used for.