Kepler orbit : get position on the orbit over time

Posted by Artefact2 on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Artefact2
Published on 2011-04-14T12:51:43Z Indexed on 2014/08/21 22:29 UTC
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I'm developing a space-simulation related game, and I am having some trouble implementing the movement of binary stars, like this:

Binary star

The two stars orbit their centroid, and their trajectories are ellipses.

I basically know how to determine the angular velocity at any position, but not the angular velocity over time. So, for a given angle, I can very easily compute the stars position (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_equation).

I'd want to get the stars position over time. The parametric equations of the ellipse works but doesn't give the correct speed : { X(t) = a×cos(t) ; Y(t) = b×sin(t) }.

Is it possible, and how can it be done?

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