Slashdot Mirror
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.
Unfortunately, nott all the bugs have been fixed. I guess that's what you get for not waiting for 1.0.
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
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
I compiled this thing, but it took my compiler SIX DAYS to finish it, and on the seventh, my compiler wouldn't restart, as if it was resting or something. ....
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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!
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
Megadodo Publications of Ursa Minor Beta have announced that they will be the largest site running Celestia as official beta testers. The software will be used for "research" purposes, sources said.
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.
geek 1 - how many galaxys can you push?
geek 2 - 15, why?
geek 1 - cause my new 'geForce 8 admantanium 8800' does 25 at like, 95 fps.
geek 2 - yeah well your boxen will still never beat mine at chess!
geek 1 - damn
I want 2D games back.