Animation for Kepler's problem

[nightowl]

Greetings everyone! I've decided recently to build a fortran code that integrates the newtonian two-body problem, just to have some fun, and I was wondering, do you know of any software, maybe similar to gnuplot, that could read the output file but instead of simply drawing a plot, creating an actual animation of the motion?

 

I know Mathematica had some facilities similar to this but:

 

1. I don't really like canned software.

 

2. The Kepler equation doesn't have (at least to my knowledge) an analytical solution so it's not as easy as just inserting the law of motion as a function of time in mathematica and let it make the movie.

 

So what I'd like would be a text based program that can read a datafile and make an animation with the numbers it reads there.

 

Thanks!

[D H]

http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SECTION00056000000000000000

[nightowl]

lmfaotrololol I had no idea gnuplot can do that. 10x!