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NCSA Releases Beta of Milky Way Galaxy

Posted by timothy on from the very-funny-guys-now-release-my-pants dept.

TellarHK writes: "One of the coolest attractions in New York City, the Hayden Planetarium is working with NCSA to produce a navigable, flexible, and soon to be open sourced representation of the Milky Way Galaxy. Available at this link the Partiview Visualization Software tool is a particle engine using OpenGL to display the galaxy on your Linux or Windows PC. A Mac OS port (presumably for OS X) is also planned. At .5 status, the program already has a very high neat factor and runs acceptably well on last month's hardware."

2 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is really cool.. by TellarHK · · Score: 3, Informative

    My suspicion is that it's actually not the real Milky Way Galaxy in the entirety, but only a few thousand stars and phenomena. Our "observable" galaxy. The friend who pointed me to this site said it was 24,000 or so.

    --
    My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
  2. Good performance by uradu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Contrary to the warnings at the site, any reasonably up to date hardware shouldn't have a problem with the large database. I have a Duron 1000 with a TNT2 and 512MB RAM, and the experience with the default settings was absolutely smooth, no jerkiness at all. Even after turning on all options I was still getting decent performance, probably around 10fps or more.

    Now they need to concentrate on navigation. For now the interface is extremely spartan, they really need some nifty navigation UI gadgets and metaphors. It was too easy to get lost amongst the stars and not see anything for long stretches. They should also let you browse the database and pick objects to jump to. Maybe a little bird's-eye view of the database in a corner that shows you where you are in the big picture would be nice, too.