How about a flight through our solar system with colors and all the details?
OpenGL makes it possible with your PC and the result looks better than a Star Trek movie trailer!

Specifications

You will model a solar system with various 3D objects representing planets and animate them using complex coordinated transformations, in which objects need to rotate on their axes as well as in orbit around each other.

You must model at least the Sun, the nine planets and a spaceship. Use polygons to model the spaceship (you decide the shape). Place each in the scene using transformations. To enhance the realism of your simulation, you should use data available here to map textures onto each planet's surface. Additionally, you must simulate the rotation of each planet about it's axis and the revolution of the planets around the sun. You can assume that all planets have elliptic orbits and that these orbits lie on the same plane.

All data (radius of planet, radius of orbit, etc.) should be given as parameters that can be easily changed. Do not hard-code them. In the past, students have read the data in from a file or declared constants within the program itself.

The user of your program should be able to control a variety of options within your simulation using the keyboard. You may choose which keys control which functions, but make sure they are clearly documented in your README file.

Extra Credit

There are many parts of the homework that are open ended. You can earn bonus points with extremely creative or artistic solutions. Make sure that you mention your assumptions, extra features, and how to run your program in your README file.

To get you started, here are some extra credit ideas:

Resources