Visualizing 100,000 Stars In Chrome

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."

Good try, but not as good as Celestia

[phlegmofdiscontent]

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?

Re:100,000?

[sanosuke001]

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.