Chapter 8

Putting It All Together

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject.

—Seneca, Roman philosopher

Well, now we’ve made it all the way up to Chapter 8. This is when we can take what was learned from the exercises up to this point and slap it together into a more complete solar-system model (although it's still missing things like comets, killer asteroids, neutrinos, and trans-Neptunian objects). And afterward, I hope you will say, “Wow! That's kinda cool!”

This chapter will be very code heavy, because the model requires both a number of new routines and modifications to existing projects. And as with some of the listings in Chapter 7, I will not present entire code files because of their length and to avoid repetition, or just to get to sleep earlier (gosh, it's 2:45 a.m. right now); therefore, you are encouraged to fetch the full projects, as well as any necessary data files, from the Apress site to ensure that you have fully functional examples. Complete the set, I always say.