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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."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Celestia by Drishmung · · 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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  2. I compiled this thing, but it took six days... by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. ....

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  3. Re:This is really cool.. by alfredw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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