NCSA Releases Beta of Milky Way Galaxy

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."

Celestia

[Drishmung]

Looks very cool. It also looks very similar to Celestia [shatters.net], 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?

Wait... this isn't the final version?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, uh, what if I'm removed in the next update of the Milky Way? I know I still need a bit of work, but I really wouldn't consider myself a bug... more of an unfinished feature. Do they have a Bugzilla system so I can check on my status?

This is really cool..

[molo]

I checked it out, and it works really well under Linux.

I have a question though.. I've always been told that our Sun was on one of the outter arms of our galazy, and that our galaxy was spiral shaped. However, from this data, it seems that the sun is towards the middle of the galaxy, and that our galaxy is disk-shaped.

Can anyone fill me in?

Thanks.

Re:This is really cool..

[TellarHK]

My suspicion is that it's actually not the real Milky Way Galaxy in the entirety, but only a few thousand stars and phenomena. Our "observable" galaxy. The friend who pointed me to this site said it was 24,000 or so.

Re:This is really cool..

[theCoder]

I'm betting that their 4MB database doesn't have all the stars in it yet. It looks like there are only stars close to Earth. That's probably why when you zoom out, you don't see the familiar spiral shape.

On a different note, isn't the name of our star "Sol", hence the Solar system? I was a little surprised to see it labeled "Sun" in the viewer.

Welcome to the Mihira System.

[gd23ka]

This could be the Mihira system... (Sanskrit), or did you forget about the persian sun-god Mithra, they worshipped in Rome around 300 BCE? Or... since we're already on the subject of sun-gods, maybe it's the Ravi system... (Sanskrit, too), or did you forget all about Ra, the Egyptian sun-god?

Or maybe it's even the 'Shawna' system, the Persian word for sun, the word which points us in the direction of Jonas, the biblical character that got swallowed by a whale (like the sun gets swallowed in the evening by the horizon).

You know, there was civilization long before people came up with Latin and ancient Greek, and they didn't call that world Terra or Erde or Earth either..., so don't complain that some call Sol Sun, trust me there are a bunch of other words for that star such as the gaelic 'Grian' which incidentally is derived from another Sanskrit word for light and warmth (I believe Khris) from which of course we derive the name 'Christ' from. They never really stopped worshipping the sun in Rome and I doubt we'll ever stop with coming up with new names for it.

Re:Welcome to the Mihira System.

[amRadioHed]

That's all terribly interesting I'm sure. However, all the poster was asking is why they didn't use the official astronomical designation for our sun.

All those other names were used by someone at sometime, but Sol is used by us today.

Re:This is really cool..

[Eccles]

I'm betting that their 4MB database doesn't have all the stars in it yet.

Given that there's ~100 billion stars in the galaxy, it would indeed be pretty good compression to compress it to 4 MB...

Re:This is really cool..

[ceejayoz]

Considering that the galactic Core (as well as dust clouds, nebulas, etc. closer to us) block out most of the opposite side of the galaxy, we don't have data on that part.

Re:This is really cool..

[alfredw]

Actually, the best data to date suggest that the Milky Way galaxy is a type SB barred-spiral galaxy, such as this one [smv.org], 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!

Re:This is really cool..

[CaptainCarrot]

As far as our location goes, we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc.

Actually, according to this article [space.com], we're between spiral arms. The arms themselves are apparently areas of intense star formation activity, and are thus too chaotic and contain too much hard radiation to allow long-term biological evolution.

Re:This is really cool..

[Angry Toad]

we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc

Do you have a reference for this? I don't mean that in a challenging way - I'm honestly curious. Having read lots of astronomical literature (as an interested party in another discipline), pretty much all I've ever heard is the typical lines about being "on the edge of an arm" or "between two arms", but I have yet to see a primary reference on this topic.

According to Burnham [amazon.com], I believe, the bright star cloud in Cygnus represents looking along the axis of one of the nearby arms (or along the interior of an arm, possibly), as does the star cloud 180 degrees opposite, which I cannot at the moment recall.

I'd be very interested in references to any actual literature in which this is examined.

Re:This is really cool..

[EvilBastard]

Push Button 22 - it turns on a overlay of the galaxy. Compare that with the data presented, and you'll see that what you thought was a simulation of the whole galaxy is actually our very-very-near neighbours.

Space is Big.

We appear to be towards the middle in this sample, because we are the point of origin for all the observations. We are slightly off centre, because it's easier to map objects away from the core itself, which is incredibly noisy.

For us to actually map all the stars in our galaxy, we'd need a lot more observation points above, below and throughout the disk, and that's something that's not going to happen soon.

It's a good map to get started with, though

Re:This is really cool..

[molo]

Yeah, after I read the manual, and saw where the galactic center is, I came to a similar conclusion. I was assuming that the bulge around the observation point was the galactic center.. very wrong.

Thanks for the note.

Even though the Milky Way is still in beta...

[diaphanous]

...I've heard that it's been in production use for several billion years.

Unfortunately, nott all the bugs [stsci.edu] have been fixed. I guess that's what you get for not waiting for 1.0.

Re:Even though the Milky Way is still in beta...

[nytes]

Man, I'm ticked.

You mean I've got to evolve all over again?

I hate this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody ever tells me I'm using an alpha until it's been billions of years and I'm used to all the bugs... uh features.

I compiled this thing, but it took six days...

[stefanlasiewski]

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. ....

Old news

[mnordstr]

Here's last months version [slashdot.org]...

Anyway, if you haven't tried it out please do so, as it is really amazing (if u have a 3D accelerator)!

Nice. needs work

[Perdo]

oooh ahhhh pretty.

Really needs a good flight model. Stopping to turn is annoying. Foward and reverse need keys with mouse look, reverse x,y axis. Would also be nice to be able to select pairs of stars and get distance data between them. Constellations would be nice too... sort of a stargate style. A "what does orion look like from polaris" sort of thing.

Re:Nice. needs work

[jimmytheant]

What, they didn't open source it?

Nice application, shame about the manual.

[h4mmer5tein]

Its a great piece of work, but come on, the PDF format manual stinks. Scanner and OCR'd paper document, blurred text, misaligned characters, its almost impossible to read without inducing severe eyestrain. Don't these guys have an electronic copy somewhere?

Beta test site announced

[rpjs]

Megadodo Publications [vogon.com] of Ursa Minor Beta have announced that they will be the largest site running Celestia as official beta testers. The software will be used for "research" purposes, sources said.

Good performance

[uradu]

Contrary to the warnings at the site, any reasonably up to date hardware shouldn't have a problem with the large database. I have a Duron 1000 with a TNT2 and 512MB RAM, and the experience with the default settings was absolutely smooth, no jerkiness at all. Even after turning on all options I was still getting decent performance, probably around 10fps or more.

Now they need to concentrate on navigation. For now the interface is extremely spartan, they really need some nifty navigation UI gadgets and metaphors. It was too easy to get lost amongst the stars and not see anything for long stretches. They should also let you browse the database and pick objects to jump to. Maybe a little bird's-eye view of the database in a corner that shows you where you are in the big picture would be nice, too.

i can here it now

[paradesign]

overheard after Toms gives benchmarking status to Partiview Visualization Software, for testing open GL 5 implementation

geek 1 - how many galaxys can you push?

geek 2 - 15, why?

geek 1 - cause my new 'geForce 8 admantanium 8800' does 25 at like, 95 fps.

geek 2 - yeah well your boxen will still never beat mine at chess!

geek 1 - damn

Nice Work!

[quantaman]

I really like what I've seen so far but there still seem to be a few bugs they need to clear up. For instance that black hole issue is a huge pain but I've heard the latest patch will be lower the gravitational constant to a more resonable value, there was some debate wether to do this or just change the speed of light but they decided the speed of light might just circumvent the problem for a while. However they're now concerned about the even larger disparity between the Nuclear and magnetric forces and gravity and there is also a concern that this may introduce another bug where objects can travel back and forth through time. The development team is still looking at the possibility of the "Rip in the space-time continueum" security issue, they've gotton some reports but they havn't been able to replicate it yet (they think it might be present in some of the alternate universe operating evnironments and say it may be a vendor issue.

More good news on the Universe front is they've finally fixed that Big Crunch bug and hope that in doing so they've also solved the Big Bang issue that caused all those problems may back. However they feel that time the Big Crunch fix may lead to increasing entropy (they are currently querrying MultiVac for solutions on this front).

I had to say this

[Sanga]

Be careful:

* do not divide by zero
* get the software to play dice.

And finally we have come to realise that shrinkwrap is the force (it holds the galaxy together)