Hi, i found a project that shows a simulation of the Milky Way with 100,000 stars. Is in 3D and is aesthetically beautiful. I also love the UI and the details of the map http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/
in the web is written:
" 100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission. Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist's rendition based on NGC 1232, a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. ... "
What do you think of this projects and of projects like this?
01-27-2017, 05:34 AM (This post was last modified: 01-27-2017, 05:39 AM by stevebowers.)
I would really like to have some sort of display system in OA which shows at least a significant fraction of the stars in the Terragen Sphere. Celestia already does that, and I've made a few OA addons for that program (and so have John Dollan and Phil B) (and Selden has made many addons too, for general use). But it would be nice to have something like this that can be read online.
When the Gaia database becomes available we will have good data on around a billion stars, a dataset that would be somewhat too big to publish as an addon - so would probably need to be accessed online.
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.
