AstroGrav 1.7.2

A wide variety of sample files are provided, including Solar System, space mission, and abstract systems, and these enable you to experiment with AstroGrav without having to go to the trouble of entering your own data.

The comprehensive editing facilities allow you to either create your own astronomical systems, or to modify existing ones, and provide you with an almost endless scope for experimentation and investigation.

AstroGrav calculates how the various objects move according to Newtons Universal Law of Gravitation, and displays the results as they are calculated. AstroGrav is very accurate, dynamically calculates orbits as a system evolves, deals correctly with object collisions, and can cope simultaneously with objects on many different timescales.

For a system containing a small number of particles, you can watch the system evolve as in a movie. For a system containing a larger number of particles, the calculations will take longer, and you may have to wait to see the next state of the system.

Major Features:

1. Astronomers interested in the evolution of gravitational systems.
2. Educationalists seeking to deliver programmes on math, physics, or astronomy.
3. Students of math, physics, or astronomy.
4. Anyone else interested in studying how objects move and interact under the force of gravity.

Enhancements:

• Added a facility to save and restore family patterns in the Edit / New Family... command.
• Added the Comet Gehrels 3 and Disaster! sample simulations.
• Corrected a fault that caused a very slow response to an attempt to select a large number of objects.
• The keyboard shortcut for the Evolve / Run Backward command now works correctly.
• Expanding and collapsing a tree node can now only be done by using its handle, and not by double-clicking on it.
• Corrected a fault that caused the preference for opening the root node of trees to be ignored in some cases.
• Various minor bug fixes and improvements.

Requirements:

• 500 MHz PowerPC G3 processor (G4 or better recommended)
• 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
• 50 MB available disk space
• There are graphics performance problems with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) which make it considerably inferior to both Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). The most serious of these problems can be avoided by never having View/Show/Auras