The Simple Artificial Solar Systems package is a zip archive containing a set of thirty different Java programs (created using Easy Java Simulations) that simulate the night sky for fictitious solar systems.  Each simulation illustrates the motion of a "Sun" and some "planets" relative to a fixed background of stars.  

Students can use these simulations to make qualitative and quantitative observations of the solar and planetary motions.  These observations can then be used to construct models (Ptolemaic, Copernican, Tychonic, etc) for that solar system.  Handouts for these projects are provided as supplementary documents.

All of the solar systems were constructed such that all planets orbit in a common plane around the central "Sun".  All orbits are circular, and thus the planets move uniformly on their orbits.  This makes the geometry of the models much simpler.

Included in the zip archive is a spreadsheet giving the required data for each system.  Instructors who want their students to complete the projects individually should assign the 30 solar systems at random and privately document which solar system (by number) each student receives. Change the name of the solar system file from "ejs_YourSolarSystem01.jar" to "StudentNameSolarSystem.jar" (using the actual names of your students, of course) and then distribute the files to your students. That way your students will not know which system they have, so even if they get a copy of the solar system data file they will not be able to determine the data for their solar system without doing the necessary work (unless they want to rely on a 1 in 30 chance of guessing correctly).

Please note that this resource requires at least version 1.5 of Java (JRE).