Nightfall

'Nightfall' simulates eclipsing binary stars and produces animated views, synthetic lightcurves, radial velocity curves, and eventually determine the best-fit model for a given set of observational data of an eclipsing binary star system. It takes into account the non-spherical shape of close binary stars, mutual reflection, and some other effects. It comes with documentation, on-line help, and observational data of real binary stars. The program supports but does not require the Gnome desktop.

'Nightfall' can handle the following configurations: overcontact (common envelope) systems, eccentric (non-circular) orbits, surface spots and asynchroneous rotation (stars rotating slower or faster than the orbital period), and the possible existence of a third star in the system ('third light').

Last updated 22 Jan, 2008


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License(s) :

GPLv2orlater

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About

Leadership
  • Rainer Wichmann - Maintainer
  • See the AUTHORS file in the distribution for a complete list - Contributor
Requirements
  • GTK+ 1.0.4 or later (Use Requirement)
  • OpenGL *or* MesaGL (Weak Prerequisite)
  • gtkglarea (both for OpenGL support) (Weak Prerequisite)
  • Gnome (Weak Prerequisite)
  • gnuplot (Weak Prerequisite)
Related Projects

Celestia, Hitchhiker 2000, spacechart

Versions

1.42

1.42 stable released 2004-06-30

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Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.