Today my good friend, hopeless Cubs fan, and supremely talented astro PhD student, Ethan Kruse released a new version of the Kepler Orrery animation.
For those not familiar with the term, an "orrery" is a mechanical model of the solar system. These types of animations have become popular in the era of exoplanets to demonstrate the incredible variety of planetary systems we have discovered. Many look very strange compared to our own, but some like Kepler 452 look tantalizingly similar.
Check out Ethan's work below, or download the animated gif version here.
Edit: Like an open source champ, Ethan has even provided the source code on GitHub! Awesome!
