01-27-2017, 06:59 AM
I agree that an online interactive display of our Galaxy which could be augmented with local addons could be fun and/or useful.
I expect that the full Gaia database could be provided in the form of multiple, partial Addons to Celestia, just as other large Addons are provided now. Because of network lag, I don't think that online access to the full database would be able to provide the realtime response times that people have come to expect, although local caching would help somewhat. People are working on creating 64 bit versions of Celestia which would be able to handle that size of database. I am hoping that they'll be available before the next Gaia data release.
The first Gaia data release provides 3D information (RA, Dec, parallax) only for most of the stars in the Tycho catalog. In other words, it doesn't provide 3D info for any stars other than the 2 million that already are available for use in Celestia, although it has more accurate positions for most of them. The 2D (RA, Dec) positions that it provided for the ~1 billion stars in the first data release have revealed that Gaia hasn't been scanning the sky uniformly: stripes are clearly visible in the data. I don't know to what extent that'll be corrected in later data releases.
I expect that the full Gaia database could be provided in the form of multiple, partial Addons to Celestia, just as other large Addons are provided now. Because of network lag, I don't think that online access to the full database would be able to provide the realtime response times that people have come to expect, although local caching would help somewhat. People are working on creating 64 bit versions of Celestia which would be able to handle that size of database. I am hoping that they'll be available before the next Gaia data release.
The first Gaia data release provides 3D information (RA, Dec, parallax) only for most of the stars in the Tycho catalog. In other words, it doesn't provide 3D info for any stars other than the 2 million that already are available for use in Celestia, although it has more accurate positions for most of them. The 2D (RA, Dec) positions that it provided for the ~1 billion stars in the first data release have revealed that Gaia hasn't been scanning the sky uniformly: stripes are clearly visible in the data. I don't know to what extent that'll be corrected in later data releases.
Selden