| ## Tutorial 6: Planets By Sean Luke

[Requires Java3D] [Tutorial 6 documentation]

Some planetary orbits, primarily to introduce the 3D graphics facility and 3D continuous field. The orbits are totally ridiculous: they're circles rather than ellipses; they're all on the same plane; and they're at the log of the proper distance so the planets can actually be seen.

This tutorial portrays the planets using planetary texture maps provided, with permission by James Hastings-Trew at JHT's Planet Pixel Emporium. The Earth texture map is from NASA. Java3D is not particularly fast at loading these texture maps: you have to be patient.

The demo is good place for you to try rotation, translation, and scaling of the 3D environment. You drag in various ways:

1. Left mouse button: Rotate the environment.
2. Middle mouse button or alt/option-left-mouse: Move the camera towards or away from the environment.
3. Right mouse button or command-left-mouse: Translate the environment (move it side to side).
4. Scale Text Field: change the magnification. This one is particularly useful in this context.

Note: this description is different from the one which appears after following the tutorial documentation. This is because the tutorial documentation overrides the `getInfo` method to provide a description. If this method is not overridden, MASON instead tries to display a file called `index.html` stored in the same directory as the simulation (which is what's going on here).