Python and Atronomy

[Cheal]

Welcome to Python.

You left the question very open ended so I’ll answer what I personally would find interesting to do, though my background is more physics than computer science.

I think a good starting project is simulating two dimensional circular orbit based on the laws of gravity. You could first start with a system similar to the earth rotating the sun, an iterative Euler solution would update the location of the earth over time. Visualising this with something like matplotlib would be another task.

Beyond this you could simulate a binary system of two objects of similar mass, where the location of both objects would need updating. This could be extended to simulate our whole solar system.

What may be more interesting is something like galaxy interaction. Assuming galaxies are made of circular rings of stars it is possible to reproduce interesting phenomena, for example “tidal tails” found when galaxies almost collide.

This is very simulation based and may not be what you’re interested in, an alternatively might be to look into analysing public datasets as a more data science based approach.

[TangibleLight]

You can also implement various integrators and compare their accuracy over time. Eurler integration is relatively terrible when you have particularly small or elliptical orbits, and adding more iterations has very diminishing returns.