Halley is an astronomy software package geared towards helping K-12 and introductory college undergraduate students attain a better understanding of the concepts behind gravity and orbital motion. As a pedagogical and research-grade simulation software package, Halley can both accurately compute the orbits of planets and spacecraft, but can also generate three-dimensional stills and movies of the orbital motion. Built using IDL (Interactive Display Language) software, Halley will be made available through IDL's Virtual Machine, a program that allows users to freely share and run IDL code on any computer.
Anticipated release of Halley version 1.0 - Summer 2010