If you take a look at a photo of, say, the Andromeda galaxy, it looks like a smoky disc containing maybe a few hundred stars.
As someone with an interest in astronomy, I of course know that the stars in such an image are just the supergiant stars, and a few might be stars in our galaxy on the same line of sight.
The majority of the stars are the “smoke”; numbering in the hundreds of billions.
On googling around, I couldn’t find a good visualization of this though, and I am considering trying to render my own.
The problem with visualizations like this one: is probably that they are too accurate.
The number of stars is so great that there is no time at which you can clearly see the galactic “smoke” breaking up into individual stars. The whole experience is just a bit “busy” and disorienting.
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel though. Is there a better visualization already out there?
(so if not clear enough already, I’m defining “better” as better bringing across the scale of a galaxy, rather than being most accurate to what you’d actually see).
NASA has a Hubbell image of Andromeda of such high resolution that about 100 million stars (a small fraction of what it has, but still!) are individually distinguishable.
My best suggestion, tho, involves the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Someone may have created what you seek already or there may be a way for you to create it yourself; the SDSS is the most complete 3D model of the Universe that we have. Searching for things with the added data point of Sloan or SDSS may help you find things.
The difficulty with the Sloan data is that it doesn’t have good distance information for most of the objects you can see in it. Some objects have known distances from other sources, and you can make estimates for many of the others, but it’s not going to be the best 3D picture.
Thanks everyone for the links.
To be honest I don’t think any of them capture the scale in quite the intuitive way that I had in mind. Which is good: it means there’s potentially an opening there for me.
The hubble super high res photo of Andromeda comes come, and loses just on practicality grounds*.
I think I may need to “cheat” and break a galaxy up into imaginary sub-structures on several scales. e.g. show a thousand stars grouped in a ball, and then zoom out to thousands of balls etc.
* …which is also mind-blowing. We’re talking about imaging 1 / 1000th of the stars in one-third of one galaxy, and it makes an image that’s 4.3GB with compression.
So we just need to repeat that a few thousand times to render most of Andromeda’s stars as dots, then we can get started on another of the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe…
In principle, you could print that out as a large mural. 8 feet high (room size), and it would only come to 231 dpi. Should be easy to pick out stars when viewed in person, and simply by walking closer and farther away you could get a sense for when the “smoke” vanishes.
If someone ever captures an even sharper image that captures every star, you could do the same–but you’d want a 20x jeweler’s loupe to pick out all the detail by eye. Still doable, though. You could see maybe 10% of the stars with the naked eye, and then with the loupe see that there’s another 9 that you missed for each one you saw.
For clarity, in the OP when I mentioned supergiants I meant in typical pictures of Andromeda, not the high res image (which I only learned about within this thread).
The zoomable image is great. But still not ideal…it looks a bit like mush at the closest distance…it’s crazy to think we’re still just seeing 1/1000th.
Yeah I think a huge canvas at some kind of event or exhibition would be a great idea. I would go just to see that.
