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CurveSimulator: A Star System and Light Curve Simulator

What does CurveSimulator?

CurveSimulator generates videos depicting the movements and eclipses of celestial bodies along with their resulting light curves. The video output simultaneously displays an overhead view and an edge-on view of the star system, accompanied by a graph showing the system's total luminosity over time.

Users can specify the physical properties of stars and planets in their system through a configuration file. Additionally, various parameters for the desired video output can be set. To gain a deeper understanding of how orbital elements influence the orbits shown in the video, refer to the Orbital Elements section.

For more detailed information on the inner workings of CurveSimulator, explore the How CurveSimulator Works section.

Why use CurveSimulator?

• Ideal for Eclipse Simulations: CurveSimulator is especially useful for simulating star systems with objects that occasionally eclipse each other, particularly exoplanets detected using the transit method.

• Enhanced Research Presentations: When writing papers about star systems, researchers can include videos or links to simulations, providing a dynamic visual representation of their findings.

• Result Verification: Users can verify their calculations of a star system's physical properties by generating a video and comparing the simulation's results (e.g., transit timing, depth, impact parameter) with expected values.

• Hypothesis Testing: The tool allows for the addition of fictional planets, enabling users to observe how these changes affect the system's behavior.

• Orbital Variation Analysis: CurveSimulator can track changes in orbiting periods and the resulting transit variations.

• Simplicity and Efficiency: Generating a video requires just two lines of Python code.

• Resource-Friendly: The software is fast and produces compact video files, typically taking about the same time to produce as the video's runtime and using less than 0.5 MB of disk space per minute.

Getting started

1. Install the package, for example with "pip install curvesimulator".

2. CurveSimulator uses ffmpeg to convert the data into a video. Find and download an executable version of ffmpeg via ffmpeg.org. Extract the downloaded zip file and (on Windows) add "yourdriveandpath\FFmpeg\bin" to the environment variable PATH.

3. Create a Python script with this code.

4. Download this example config file to the directory containing your Python script.

5. Run your script. If all went well, you have just generated your first video with CurveSimulator. If not, contact me.

For questions and comments open an issue on GitHub.

To begin using CurveSimulator, follow these steps: Install the package using pip: pip install curvesimulator. Download and set up ffmpeg: Visit ffmpeg.org to download an executable version. Extract the zip file and add the bin directory to your system's PATH environment variable. Create a Python script with the required code. Download the example configuration file and place it in the same directory as your Python script. Run your script. If successful, you will have generated your first video with CurveSimulator. For questions, comments, or troubleshooting, please open an issue on the CurveSimulator GitHub repository.