How difficult is it to simulate gravitational influences and perturbing effects on celestial orbits with Maple? Could this syntax http://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=4484&view=html be altered without excessive changes to consider these aspects?

Are there somewhere worksheets to take a look at as an introduction and to see how such goals would be approached and implemented?

Some time ago, I have used the Virtual 3D Solar System code to plot a few interesting figures with asteroids. It can be found here: http://www.maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=4484&view=html . I plotted the asteroid belt as a closed, warped surface according to how the asteroids are inclined, with the arguments of perihelion and longitude of ascending node where they cross the equatorial plane to the other celestial hemisphere. The plot was only done with axes in units of distances, for convenience's sake in astronomical units of 1 AU = 150 million km.

But I am strongly wondering if it were somehow possible to alter or adjust the code such that there is a zylinder placed around such plot where one can see celestial coordinates (Rectascension, Declination) on the inside, so that if one wants to know what coordinates an orbit of a specific asteroid has that one can look in the chart and go out on the balcony and set the telescope to these coordinates. Of course the asteroid most likely is not there on his entire orbital path, but you have at least the location where the asteroid CAN be. Would this be possible to plot?

This probably doesn't work if a closed cylinder is placed around the Virtual Solar System. But how about scrolling the cylinder and the orbits flat on a 2D plot?

Is it possible to make scatter-histogram plots in Maple13 like these

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6508769/matplotlib-scatter-hist-with-stepfilled-histtype-in-histogram ?

I achieved the scatter-plot, but what about the additional histograms?

I have a surfdata-plot which - by interpolation - goes through different circles with different inclinations with respect to each other. The surface is color-coded with zhue from violet to red. In order to see the valleys behind peaks I would like to have a filled 2D-plot of my zhue-surfdata colors with contours wherever the surface passes z-coordinate integers located somewhere below the surface (e.g. at z=-7). Unfortunately, I haven't found examples of contourplots for surfdata plots so far.

Download Worksheet_Surfdata-contourplot.mwWorksheet_Surfdata-contourplot.mw

When trying to plot "Example1" from this page www.rhitt.com/courses/227/su99/Maple/html/surfaces2.html I get an error message that Maple cannot make a plot structure from an object with the transformation proc( (x,y) -> [x,y,-.3] end proc) . How can I plot this example?