Dieter Egger, 1997-01-25
In the following applet you may watch the movement of a very tiny body orbiting about a very heavy central body. Both bodies are treated like point masses or radially symmetric mass distributions. In this simple case the orbit is represented by an ellipse which remains constant with respect to time. We call this ellipse Kepler Ellipse or Kepler Orbit.
Click into the applet's area and drag the mouse in order to change the shape of the ellipse. The bottom line shows the actual eccentricity.
Due to Kepler's third law the satellite moves faster when near to the central body and much slowlier when far away from it. This way a comet is spending most of its lifetime far away from the sun.
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Dieter Egger, 1997-01-25