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Comment by speleo

1 day ago

Hi there! This is Val, I made the star chart. There's a little "about" blurb you can open in a modal on the site, but I wanted to mention that this demo uses the amazing GAIA DR3 dataset from ESA. I have a Python script that renders all 1.8+ billion stars into custom images, which is what I used for the skybox. The star positions and colors all use the GAIA data (save for a few bright stars not in the set). The data is amazing, and if you have any interest in doing some fun projects with open data I recommend checking it out: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr3

45 comments

speleo

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rob74  11 hours ago

Cool! One question: what do the planes represent? I thought it was the galactic plane and planes parallel to it, but then I saw that the "band" of the galaxy is (almost?) perpendicular to it, which doesn't fit somehow?

EDIT: TIL that the ecliptic plane of the Solar System is at an 60.2° angle to the galactic plane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_plane#/media/File:Mot...) - until now I somehow assumed that they were more or less parallel and never questioned that assumption. So it looks like the "main" plane is the ecliptic plane (which is of course very anthropocentric, after all the ecliptic plane doesn't really matter anymore once you leave the Solar System? But I guess that was they way it was shown in the movie?). Would be interesting to be able to switch to showing the galactic plane instead...

  • adolph  6 hours ago

    Thank you for posting this. I wonder if anyone has made a physical galactic orrery. It seems that the concept is used in the video game Warhammer.

    Something implicit in the diagrams of the galactic plane but not explicitly stated is that the solar system travels clockwise (retrograde) around the galaxy [0]. I find this unexpected as I thought the same "right hand rules" of planetary motion [1] were somehow connected to those of electromagnetism [2] and would apply upwards in scale.

      The Sun follows the solar circle (eccentricity e < 0.1) at a speed of about 
  255 km/s in a clockwise direction when viewed from the galactic north pole at 
  a radius of ≈ 8.34 kpc about the center of the galaxy near Sgr A*, and has 
  only a slight motion, towards the solar apex, relative to the LSR.

    0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_standard_of_rest

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_of_astronomical_bodies

    2. https://www.arborsci.com/blogs/cool/three-right-hand-rules-o...

    • narag  5 hours ago

      I wonder if anyone has made a physical galactic orrery.

      Maybe it's harder than it seems. Does a definite galactic plane even exist? The ecliptic is defined by Earth's orbit, not a mean of all the planets. IIRC Sun's rotation plane is not aligned, not should it matter.

      If there's a way to measure galactic plane, independently of Sun's orbit around the galaxy center (that also seems difficult to determine) it would involve measuring positions and trajectories of many very distant objects.

      2 replies →

redbluething  17 hours ago

This is awesome!! I made a map of the events in the Martian many years ago (https://www.cannonade.net/mars.php) and when I read Hail Mary I wondered if something could be created for the new book.

You completely nailed it!! :)

  • simgt  11 hours ago

    That's an awesome website! I had never heard of Patrick O'Brian before looking at your maps, I'll give The Mauritius Command a read.

RobotToaster  1 hour ago

I wonder if it's possible to import this data into blender, for excessively accurate space backgrounds.

taikon  17 hours ago

How many 3D bodies are there? I'm curious because it renders really fast even on a relatively old mobile phone.

  • shit_game  13 hours ago

    If I counted things correctly, 53,836.

    I wanted to hook into the THREE object and explore the scene, but I wasn't able to figure out how to bring it back into scope after it's been optimized out of the js context, so instead I searched through the bundle to find where it unpacks the data and did that manually.

    • p-e-w  12 hours ago

      It just boggles the mind how you can simply write a 3D program with a ready-made library today, instantiate tens of thousands of objects in 3D space, and the whole thing will render in real time on a phone without you ever having to worry about how that incredible performance is possible.

      The power of computers comes at least partly from the fact that for many practical problems, they let you effectively pretend that resource constraints don’t exist at all.

      2 replies →

teekert  14 hours ago

Very cool! With a few additions (and with part 5 a lot perhaps) you can also have one for the Bobbiverse! (I recognize some names)

  • matt727  14 hours ago

    I've had making something like this for the Bobbiverse in the back of my mind for years. Maybe this is what finally will make me start.

orsenthil  21 hours ago

Since you built it, I am curious about the scientific accuracy of the movie, book and while taking the information GAIA DR3. I wanted to assume at least the stars part is science, but I think, there is a lot of fiction in that setting. Is this map the reality of what we know as science, since it came from GAIA DR3 dataset?

And, thank you very much. This is super cool and exciting. I wish such a one exists for Asimov's foundation universe (fiction).

  • nunez  16 hours ago

    The book does a significantly better job explaining the science behind the mission than the movie (which I found insulting, but I'm clearly in the minority of holding that opinion).

  • JonathonW  17 hours ago

    The stars featured in the movie and in this chart (and in the book) are real, and reflect their real-world locations.

    The planets around the stars, aside from our own solar system (obviously), are fictional-- both Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani are stars where we're looking for exoplanets, but we don't have strong evidence for either yet.

    • hgoel  16 hours ago

      IIRC at the time the book was written, there was some data suggesting a planet detection around 40 Eridani, but has been ruled out since then.

arunix  7 hours ago

Altair looks closer than Alpha-Centauri on this map, although it's actually 4 times as far (probably Z axis squashing).

gcanyon  7 hours ago

I'm writing a novella about a trip to Gliese 581 and I'd love to do a similar visualization -- any advice?

asabla  1 day ago

Super cool! how long did it take to generate all those custom images?

  • speleo  1 day ago

    Thanks! On my desktop it takes around 20 minutes to generate a full sky render with 1.8 billion stars (down to around 22 magnitude).

ProofHouse  18 hours ago

So very cool! Have been tooling on some very similar space mapping and smiled as I was looking at this. Love the data recommend have not seen that yet, thanks!

echelon  1 day ago

This is really cool!

Feature request: can you add WASD navigation? Arrow keys are weird on different keyboards. On mine they're squashed into the corner and not fun to use. WASD is the OG OP way to navigate. (WASDQE, where QE are the vertical plane, if you're into Unreal Engine key bindings.)

  • joemi  1 day ago

    I don't know if I'd say it's the OG way. Both HJKL and numpad predate WASD, I think.

brcmthrowaway  18 hours ago

Claude?

  • wutwutwat  15 hours ago

    I had claude shit out a site that tracked the recent moon flyby mission and the visual feel of that site is very much like this one, and my first thought when the page loaded was this was an ai project.

    Sadly we live in a world where software engineer "stolen valor" now exists, where someone with no or little actual engineering ability will use ai to shit out something and then claim they made it themselves.

    Not 100% certain that's happening here, but it can't be a coincidence that this site looks so much like a site I had AI create tracking other things in space, imo