Stuart Levy, salevy@illinois.edu  NCSA, University of Illinois
http://virdir.ncsa.illinois.edu/partiview

Last updated 2017-11-22 -- addition of 'Oumuamua, interstellar visitor on a hyperbolic orbit!


To just use the partiview ".speck" files included here, ...

    transneptunian.speck

could be added directly to the AMNH Digital Universe data.  It is already in the proper scale (1 parsec per unit, galactic coordinates).   However that scale is rather small, so from the initial view -- about 3 parsecs from the sun -- you won't see anything unless you zoom very far in, and adjust the clipping planes accordingly ("clip" command).

It was produced by running:
   perl elements2speck.pl transneptunian.elements  > transneptunian.speck

An easier thing to view in partiview, if you don't need the celestial context, is either of:

    transneptunian.ecl.speck    (ecliptic coordinates, 1 AU per unit)
    transneptunian.eq.speck     (equatorial J2000 coordinates, 1 AU per unit)

They were produced by running with the '-ecl' and '-eq' options:
    perl elements2speck.pl  -ecl  transneptunian.elements  > transneptunian.ecl.speck
    perl elements2speck.pl  -eq   transneptunian.elements  > transneptunian.eq.speck

If you have a copy of the partiview source distribution (see http://virdir.ncsa.illinois.edu/partiview), then you can combine "transneptunian.eq.speck" with the partiview data file "hipbright.speck" to see the orbits in the context of the stars.   You'd want to give them very different scales, but the relative orientations will be already correct.  (You can see the asymptotes of Oumuamua's orbit extending toward near Vega, and toward the Great Square of Pegasus!)

Edit the file:

    with-stars.cf

to set the proper path to the partiview data directory - here we assume it is ../../partiview/data.  Then run

   partiview with-stars.cf

and look around!   The stars are scaled up ("tfm 100"), but not by nearly as much as they should be -- by default, 1 parsec among the stars is only 100 AU on the solar system side.  You can raise the "tfm" value somewhat, and adjust the far "clip" value accordingly, until the distant stars begin to flicker.

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If you'd like to be able to convert other orbital elements in the same style, keep reading.

For usage information, see the first few lines of the files "wiki2elements.pl" and "elements2speck.pl",
or run them in a command window:
    perl wiki2elements.pl
and
    perl elements2speck.pl

To (re-)convert the files that are already here, you'd follow the example that wiki2elements.pl gives:
    perl wiki2elements.pl  transneptunian.wiki  > transneptunian.elements
        (to convert the wikipedia text to comma-separated orbital elements)
    perl elements2speck.pl  transneptunian.elements > transneptunian.speck
        (to convert elements to partiview form)

I checked the orbits of Mars and Pluto against those from your solsys speck file and they seem to match well, so the transformation etc. seems right.

You may want to edit "transneptunian.wiki".  These are orbital elements, copied-and-pasted from the wikipedia pages linked-to from that top-level page.  (You can't use the elements tabulated in that main list of transneptunians directly -- they include some elements, but not the ones needed to find the orbital orientation: longitude-of-ascending-node and argument-of-perihelion.)  If you find any others tabulated in this form, just add them in.

You can add lines to each "paragraph" in transneptunian.wiki to specify the orbit color, longitude of the label, or number of orbit points.

The default for labels now is to plant a label for each object, at a longitude that's derived from the orbit color (10 degrees per unit color-index), so the labels get decently spaced out.

You could also edit "transneptunian.elements", comma-separated orbital elements in something like the form you suggested -- see elements2speck.pl for details.

To suppress a label, put "none" for its longitude.  Writing "-" (or leaving it blank) makes elements2speck.pl use its default, "10c+30", putting the label at an orbit-color-specific place.

Re colormaps: although the first entry is index 0, that doesn't mean you have to use it.  If it makes most sense for the first orbit to be "-c 1", then just stick a dummy color in the cmap's first slot.