Came across this impressive 3D starmap this morning. It accurately shows the nearest 100,000 stars, embedded in a rough map of the entire Milky Way. The play button at the top left gives a guided tour, or you can move the view manually. Well worth a play.
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
It’s a bit like playing that old game Frontier: Elite 2.
Without checking out your link (I can’t wait to try it out tomorrow!), it seems rather like “Celestia,” a wonderful and free software which has for several years allowed you to wander through the universe (well, through the Milky Way, anyway), “visiting” stars at their actual locations relative to each other. Wanna know what Orion looks like from Casseiopia? Easy!
When I last played with Celestia a couple years ago, I was amazed at how quickly I got lost. You start on Earth, pick a star, zoom to it, look around, pick another star, zoom to that, and just like that, you are IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. It’s quite a scary feeling, actually. You look around, and you have no idea how to get back “home.” You soon realize just how freakin’ huge our galaxy is. And that’s just one galaxy of millions!
Wowza.
Neato. Wouldn’t it be cool if “quantum foam” had the same structure as the universe…I mean, down to every “Great Wall” and void?
Now THAT would be freaky!
Okay, I’ll put away the lava lamp and get back to work…
It’s fun, but it looks like half the stars are missing. I can’t find several nearby, high-apparent-magnitude stars like Alpha Centauri, Vega, Sirius, and Procyon.
Not sure why, they are all there when I open it.
I found all of those stars.
I’m guessing you’re looking from too far away. Those stars are all very nearby (astronomically speaking).
It wouldn’t depend on the time of day and your lattitude, would it? In the latter case I’d never see Alpha Centauri anyway.
Help please. Recently there was another thread about, I think, the latest Hubble xdf, or extreme deep field image. The resolution is, well, extreme. The original downloadable image is many GBs in size, but someone linked to another site that offered the image in a zoomable format. It was very cool zooming in deeper and deeper and deeper. I can’t find it now. Anyone remember it?
Nevermind. I found it. It’s an ESA Vista telescope 9 gigapixel image.
Looked all over using google and couldn’t find it. Then I used DuckDuckGo and it came right up.
The link to the full screen zoomable image is near the bottom of the page.
This map gives a view from from outside the solar system, not from the surface of the Earth, so that wouldn’t be an issue here.
Just bumped the thread to say the missing stars are now visible for me.