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Visualizing 100,000 Stars In Chrome

Posted by Soulskill on from the oh-my-god-it's-full-of-webgl dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google has rolled out a new web experiment for Chrome. This one is a visualization of the locations of over 100,000 nearby stars. It pulls data from astrometric databases and catalogs to show accurate relative locations of the stars. You can zoom and pan around the cluster, zoom all the way in to the solar system, or zoom all the way out to see how even this huge number of stars is dwarfed by the rest of the Milky Way. It also has data on a number individual stars in our stellar neighborhood. This web app works best in Chrome (much like their previous one, Jam With Chrome), but I was able to try it in Firefox as well."

12 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Good try, but not as good as Celestia by phlegmofdiscontent · · Score: 4, Informative

    I played around with it a bit, but it seems to be somewhat lacking compared to Celestia, which does many of the same things and more. A couple gripes: Sirius was listed as Alpha Cassiopeiae, though it's Bayer designation is Alpha Canis Majoris. Also, it seems to be lacking nearly all of the red dwarfs that make up the majority of the solar neighborhood. Seriously? No Wolf 359?

    1. Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      The Google engineer who developed this lost several descendants at the Battle of Wolf 359 you insensitive clod.

    2. Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Funny

      Google engineers don't have descendants.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    3. Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia by Rick+Richardson · · Score: 2

      Celestia plays fine on my Mesa DRI Intel G33.  On Chrome I get: "Either your graphics card or your browser does not support WebGL".

    4. Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia by number6x · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What kind of dark ages operating system are you using? download managers?

      sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

      Worked for me.

      What could be more standard than that?

    5. Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia by IonSwitz · · Score: 2

      When you try to get your non-science geek friends to understand why you think "space and stuff" is fascinating, it is a lot easier to point them to a web page like this, and have them goof around a but, rather then tell them "Download and install Celestia, it's a lot more accurate". Sometimes in the realm of non-geeks, accessibility trumps accuracy. This is one of the cases where the lack of accuracy don't really hurt that much.

    6. Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia by swillden · · Score: 2

      Google engineers don't have descendants.

      Ssshhh. My "kids" don't know!

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  2. Re:100,000? by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    I wonder how many lightyears that covers?

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. Re:100,000? by sanosuke001 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The HYG Database they linked to is enough stars; I used it at work to create a realistic star map for a geospatial visualization by mapping their spherical coordinates to a unit sphere and drawing in 3D (OpenGL) and using their magnitude and temperature for color/brightness.

    The HYG Database is all the visible-to-the-naked-eye stars within 20 parsecs; when you say, "that's not that many stars" well, you can't see much more than that anyway so it's a good start.

    --
    -SaNo
  4. Re:100,000? by sanosuke001 · · Score: 2

    Oops, I meant 50 parsecs. Slashdot should really allow comment editing for logged-in users...

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    -SaNo
  5. Re:This is cool by Lennie · · Score: 2

    The good thing about Google is, it attracted many people from academia and other really smart people which try to do real research.

    The bad thing is obviously: privacy.

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    New things are always on the horizon
  6. Re:Mindless ivory tower party tricks by halltk1983 · · Score: 2

    How dare they control the data they've spent so much to collect! If only there was some way for you to make your own search engine, and gather such results.

    --
    Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.