Visualizing 100,000 Stars In Chrome 68
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."
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ninaninanina
We had a lovely total solar eclipse this week and you didn't get to see it...
Love and kisses
<3 XXX <3
Australia
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I wonder how many lightyears that covers?
Re:100,000? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Had Hollywood worried there for a moment... (Score:1, Funny)
...with a headline like that.
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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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You mean Google has been involved in Somalia?
Good try, but not as good as Celestia (Score:5, 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?
Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia (Score:4, Funny)
The Google engineer who developed this lost several descendants at the Battle of Wolf 359 you insensitive clod.
Re:Good try, but not as good as Celestia (Score:5, Funny)
Google engineers don't have descendants.
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Google engineers don't have descendants.
Ssshhh. My "kids" don't know!
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So you have been telling your kids you work for google?
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I can't get google's app to run in my browser, but if it's leaving out stars like Wolf-359 what's the point?
Sol Station has had similar functionality since 2001, and afaik doesn't leave anything out. Although the interface probably isn't as polished, it works just fine:
http://www.solstation.com/47ly-ns.htm [solstation.com]
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I was going to rebut with how large a download Chrome is, but they use some sort of non-standard install manager rather than a downloadable package. You also wind up downloading all of the application code and data to view the page anyway (even if the Javascript code for this is more compact than an executable (doubtful), the dataset is the big piece and that's coming down either way). Plus, the native app probably isn't going to suck down nearly as much CPU.
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What kind of dark ages operating system are you using? download managers?
Worked for me.
What could be more standard than that?
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I don't know, something dark ages like Windows 7 perhaps. The Google Chrome download for Windows is a 755k stub installer that obscures the actual size of the whole product it downloads in the background.
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... You do realize apt is a download manager, RIGHT? Not arguing your actual point, but your wording just shows your trying too hard.
People who use real OSes A) don't use the command line to install software 99% of the time, and B) are smart enough to know that Chrome is just the download manager for 'webapps' that run inside it.
Note: I'm not saying Linux isn't a real OS, just that your usage of it precludes your install from being one.
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This runs in a browser. Celestia is a 32.8MB download.
You saying an browser app couldn't download 32.8mb of data while using it? Please, it could and would do that no problem. A lot of that 32mb happens to be the star data, something which instead of downloading all at once for quickness, you download as you go.
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I'm just glad there isn't an Apple Maps version.
Barnard's Star would probably be sitting between Jupiter and Saturn.
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Circa 1993, Frontier did that in 720kb on a 386 (Score:1)
And now Elite:Dangerous is gonna do it again - check the Kickstarter campaign (bland fan promo) at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous
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Earth (Score:2)
Earth is stown only as a dot with a label, zooming in doesn't work. Beh, and I wanted to see how good data they have around my home :p.
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Reminds me (Score:2)
Of the Chart demo in BeOS.
Works better in Firefox (Score:2)
for me at least. Chrome takes way more CPU on my Linux 64-bit machine.
Also, instructions say use mouse to pan, but mouse rotates--could not find out how to pan, so could never get close to anything but our own neighborhood...
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Yes, these graphics things, like WebGL always work really well for me in Firefox on Linux at home. Strange enough, even better than on Windows at work.
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Thanks, that does help. But it only works for a handful of known stars in our neighborhood...
Performance (Score:1)
Ok I know my computer is definitely sub-par graphic-wise by today standards, but the performance is atrocious.
And I'm talking about FPW (Frames Per Week) here.
FPS on the other hand (Fuck Per Second) is rather high though.
Oh, and the mouse wheel's zoom controls are reversed.
Rev 2.0... (Score:2)
Very nice! Congrats Google. Now, for version 2.0, how about we add proper motion [wikipedia.org] of the stars along with some gravitational forces so we can see how the whole n-body problem [wikipedia.org] plays out. Let us zoon forward and backward in time!
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Simple put, with out a cluster of computers or GPUs, you don't have the processing power for doing n-body simulations.
How is this "news"? (Score:2)
I tried this out at least a month ago.
Way cool, yes.
News, no.
Ha ha, only serious (Score:2)
Warning: Scientific accuracy is not guaranteed. Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation.
No more Chrome for me... (Score:2)
I never understood why Google Chrome chose to actually compile flash into their engine... until my Mac OSX 10.5 laptop was "depricated". Now it makes sense. There is a lot of money to be had forcing users to upgrade their OS because none of the software works any longer.
Firefox and Safari work fine and I'm able to download Flash updates, but Chrome no longer works without bugging me to death about Flash being too old. I literally have no choice but to manually enable each and every page every time one lo
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Frontier Elite 2 (Score:1)
Just like playing Frontier Elite 2 again...only in a...[ehem]...enhanced edition.
Severly limited... (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
There has been an app named "What'sUp" on the Blackberry Playbook tablets for more than one year that shows this and far more, allowing you for instance to point the tablet to the sky and show exactly which stars are in that direction at this time.
It's a classical example of using all the sensors (GPS, gravity and magnetic).
As far as I remember, nobody kneeled at the time.
Ah yes, it was not GOOGLE-branded. Sorry, mod me flamebait, quick, before thinking.
Link to the Blackberry App world: https://appworld.bla [blackberry.com]