an orbital painting instrument

Chromatic Orbits

tap for an orbit  ·  drag & release to slingshot  ·  collisions burst into pigment

01 — The mechanism

Gravity does the drawing

There is no brush engine and no prerecorded path. One softened inverse-square sun sits at the centre of the stage, and everything you see — rosettes, braids, comet smears — is a body honestly falling around it while a pen of light records where it went.

  1. 01

    Launch

    Tap anywhere and a planet drops into a near-circular orbit — tangential velocity √(GM/r), jittered a touch so rings precess into rosettes instead of stacking. Drag and release to slingshot, guided by a dotted preview that runs the exact same integrator the planet will use.

  2. 02

    Fall

    Every frame, each planet feels a = GM/r² toward the sun, integrated with semi-implicit Euler at four substeps. The integrator is symplectic — energy barely drifts — so a tapped-in ellipse keeps its shape for minutes, slowly rotating into a flower.

  3. 03

    Paint

    Each substep strokes the planet's path onto a canvas that never clears: a wide whisper of halo, then a bright core, both composited additively so crossings bloom toward white like long-exposure film. Fast near the sun means a thin filament; slow at apoapsis, the ink pools wide.

Live — one planet, its velocity v and the sun's pull g. Click to relaunch it on a new ellipse.

semi-implicit Euler  ·  4 substeps / frame  ·  additive 'lighter' compositing  ·  0 libraries in the simulation

Live preview — this is your painting, framed as it will export.
03 — The poster

Leave with something printable

One click composites your session onto a 1600×2000 plate: the palette's deep background, your trails fitted inside a hairline frame, the sun and surviving planets stamped in, and a caption block set like a gallery label.

  • 1600 × 2000 px PNG — crisp at A3
  • Palette name signed in italic Fraunces
  • Launch count, date and swatch strip stamped
  • Nothing uploaded — rendered and saved locally
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