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NCSA Releases Beta of Milky Way Galaxy
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."
Looks very cool. It also looks very similar to Celestia, a free app which also uses OpenGL to do its thing. Since they both ultimately use the same information---the 3-D location of the stars in the Milky Way---I wonder if you could just plug the Partiview database into Celestia? In fact, I wonder if the databases are appreciably different?
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I'm betting that their 4MB database doesn't have all the stars in it yet. It looks like there are only stars close to Earth. That's probably why when you zoom out, you don't see the familiar spiral shape.
On a different note, isn't the name of our star "Sol", hence the Solar system? I was a little surprised to see it labeled "Sun" in the viewer.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
This could be the Mihira system... (Sanskrit), or did you forget about the persian sun-god Mithra, they worshipped in Rome around 300 BCE? Or... since we're already on the subject of sun-gods, maybe it's the Ravi system... (Sanskrit, too), or did you forget all about Ra, the Egyptian sun-god?
Or maybe it's even the 'Shawna' system, the Persian word for sun, the word which points us in the direction of Jonas, the biblical character that got swallowed by a whale (like the sun gets swallowed in the evening by the horizon).
You know, there was civilization long before people came up with Latin and ancient Greek, and they didn't call that world Terra or Erde or Earth either..., so don't complain that some call Sol Sun, trust me there are a bunch of other words for that star such as the gaelic 'Grian' which incidentally is derived from another Sanskrit word for light and warmth (I believe Khris) from which of course we derive the name 'Christ' from. They never really stopped worshipping the sun in Rome and I doubt we'll ever stop with coming up with new names for it.
Actually, the best data to date suggest that the Milky Way galaxy is a type SB barred-spiral galaxy, such as this one, which is M83, an SBa. Most sources still list us as an Sb, though... standard sprial like Andromeda (M31).
As far as our location goes, we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc. The majority of the galaxy is located in the direction of Sagittarius, but is only dimly visible because of large amounts of intervening dust. Fortunately, the dust scatters radio wavelengths far less than visible ones, so accurate mapping is possible throughout.
Note that it probably isn't perfect - even Hubble can only measure the distances to stars directly out to about 200 ly (or around 80pc). The galaxy itself is approximately 50 kpc in diameter, so all of the distant stars are ranged using "standard candles," or guessing at the brightness of a distant star because its spectrum/oscillations look like a nearby one and extrapolating.
It's not totally accurate, but it's pretty good!
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Its a great piece of work, but come on, the PDF format manual stinks. Scanner and OCR'd paper document, blurred text, misaligned characters, its almost impossible to read without inducing severe eyestrain. Don't these guys have an electronic copy somewhere?