NCSA Releases Beta of Milky Way Galaxy

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 25, 2002 @12:44PM 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."

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Celestia by Drishmung · 2002-07-25 12:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?

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