2D Animated Orbits
Explore how to animate 2D orbits using Matplotlib's FuncAnimation in Python. Understand preparing orbit data, plotting trajectories, and optimizing animations with techniques like blitting to create smooth visual simulations relevant to aerospace engineering.
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Now, let’s animate the orbit. Note that you have reset the argument of perigee to be 0 degrees.
Matplotlib’s FuncAnimation() takes a function and computes the next value given a range, plots the new value, waits a specified period of time, and then plots the next value. In your case, your animation is really just displaying the pre-computed X and Y coordinates of the orbit. You need to do some prep work to plot the orbit, plot the starting point of a red dot that will go around the orbit, and internally define an animate() function that accepts the incremental value i and returns (pos[i][1], pos[i][0]), so that the FuncAnimation() function can plot the new coordinates. ...