Sirius has always been my star; the one I love gazing at from my rooftop after the 10–6 job. Just me, the cold breeze and that insanely bright point in the night sky.

I still remember the day I found out Sirius isn’t a single star at all but a binary star system. Two stars (and some legends whisper about a Sirius C 👀) orbiting each other in this elegant elliptical dance, completing a revolution every 50.1 years. Their distance swings from 8.2 AU to 31.5 AU… wild science stuff for a tiny consciousness like mine. Tho, I never got a chance to see them with my own eyes besides a glimpse in the night sky (one day for sure, with a very fancy telescope 👌) but that never stopped me.

So I built a little simulation to see how they orbit; took me a week of human time, which apparently is like 0.16 bee years 🐝😅; had to fight weird curvature glitches on the grid, learn new maths, fix things I didn’t even know were “things” but damn… it felt good.

And honestly, I’d been feeling distracted lately; that endless IG scrolling was making me feel disconnected from myself; taking a small break to work on this project gave me the most organic kind of dopamine; like butterflies in my stomach, the good kind.

a little bit about this project, this is a "Simulation of Sirius Binary System in Python + OpenGL" and this video shows a 3D simulation of the Sirius binary star system; Sirius A & Sirius B; using Python, OpenGL and Keplerian orbital physics. The project includes accurate orbital eccentricity, barycenter movement, star rotation and a curved spacetime grid to visualize gravity.

The simulation is rendered using:
Modern OpenGL (core 3.3)
PyOpenGL for real-time graphics
GLFW for window + input handling
Pyrr for math and matrix operations
Everything you see; stars, orbits, trails, starfield and gravitational distortion runs live in Python.

Features Shown in the Video
Accurate Kepler orbit for Sirius A & B
Real orbital eccentricity (0.5914)
Barycenter (center of mass) visualization
Rotating 3D spheres with lighting
Star trails
Background starfield
Spacetime curvature grid (optional)
Polar/latitude-longitude grid overlay
Two camera modes (Orbit & Free-Look)

About Sirius A & B
Sirius A: Brightest star in Earth's night sky
Sirius B: A dense white dwarf companion
Orbital period: ~50 years
Highly eccentric orbit (0.5914), meaning not circular
They orbit a shared barycenter, not each other directly.
This simulation uses simplified Newtonian/Kelperian math for real-time rendering.

AND at the end; sometimes you just need the stars to remind you who you are. 🙂

Simulation of Sirius binary system