smaerd - 4-11-2012 at 13:16
Here's a little applet I made to show-case how the shapes of atomic orbitals come about. It is written in Java using the JOGL(Java Open GL) libraries.
Was a fun little weekend project. Works for me on linux, and on the Windows computers at school. Might not work for you depending on what version of
Java you have and such 
.
click and drag the mouse to orbit around the Y axis. Drag the slide-bar to zoom in or out.
http://realchemist.zxq.net/pages/applets/orbitalexplorer.php
I realize these aren't all of the orbitals and that the Dz^2 orbital is not in the right plane, I could fix it but I liked it better that way. I still
believe it is demonstrative and a neat way to spend a minute or something.
Never realized how spherical the P orbitals were. In many texts they show them to be such long probability distributions where as according to my
calculations they are pretty spherical.
[Edited on 4-11-2012 by smaerd]