Hello,

I am on the lookout for something which can visualize the near universe fully navigable and in 3D.

I know that the milky way is about 100k light years across and the next big galaxy, Andromeda, is ten times bigger. Yet so far I have not found anything where you can fly around the stars (given the actual distance is known) to actually "see" this, watch the constellations getting distorted, see how the planetary plane of the solar system is tilted in relation to the milky way etc. etc.

Most software I found so far merely offers a beautiful (Google Sky) yet static view of the night sky. Something which would allow the continuation of Google Earth's "from your house to the planet" zooming, continued up to the local galactic cluster would be quite awe-inspiring I imagine.

I'm sorry I can't comment on your main question.

I must question "Andromeda, is ten times bigger"! By just about every measure, M31 and the Milky way are about the same size. M31s disk is slightly larger, but ours is more massive, etc.

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Celestia seems like the sort of thing you want.
The recent "pre" releases for version 1.5.0 include an improved galaxy database and rendering.

The latest prerelease download is:
http://www.shatters.net/~claurel/cel...-1.5.0pre5.exe

But you should try the current offical release via the Celestia homepage first.

Grant Hutchison

Yup. I'll second that. Celestia.

But I would caution about accurate visualizations of the Milky Way. We have good 3D locations on about a quarter million stars. Its a long way from a being a galaxy's worth of stars to fly around in so some scientific speculation must prevail in the visualization.

Veeger

In Celestia, the stars just stop at the limit of the Hipparcos catalogue. The rest of the galaxy (and other galaxies) are volume rendered using luminous blobs, according to their classification and orientation.
(The Milky Way galaxy rendering is customized so that the arms are correctly arranged according to current radio mapping, even though they contain no rendered stars.)
There is of course some unavoidable speculation: we need radii, rotation periods and oblateness just to show extrasolar planets, for instance, so I derived those using equations based on theory. But you won't find any completely imaginary objects in the Celestia distribution package.

Grant Hutchison

I thought I recognized your name, Grant. You played a role in the development of Celestia, didn't you? Excellent. A very fine piece of work and congrats to the entire group who worked on the software. Sincerely. (I program astronomy software for fun and edification and appreciate good work by others.)

Best,
Veeger

Yes, that's me on the author list, though these days I really just maintain some of the definition files.
Thanks for the kind words.

Grant Hutchison

Thank you, Celestia looks wonderful!

It seems the Solar System is tilted at an angle of >60°, also the distortion of constellations looks great :).

Yet, as you wrote, it prefers scientific accuracy to artistic vision, e.g. the milky way looks more like a barred spiral galaxy than the spiral galaxy it is thought to be - but this can't be seen, since we are in the middle of it. Also zooming far out leaves only blackness and not even an artistic vision of the galaxies in the entire universe (I have seen some nice posters about this which I am planning to get really-soon-now(tm) :).

As to that, I remember(ed) news such as this: Vast halo extends (Andromeda) galaxy's size (news.bbc.co.uk) from early 2007, especially the "out to a distance of 500,000 light-years from the galaxy's centre."-part, so 0.1m vs. 1m ly was easy to remember and it stuck. Reading up on that now it seems these Red Giants cannot really be concidered part of the galaxy etc. etc.

I haven't yet come across a greater comprehensive application of the simulation of the cosmos than Starry Night, if there is one, that doesn't cost thousands, I'd like to hear of it, cause this one will probably stay with me for life otherwise.

Watching the dynamics of the solar system play out realistically(mathematically realistic!) against 11gigs worth of seamless imagery.

Being able to "turn back time" and observe the sky as it was 500..1000..2000 years ago, having a wealth of information in the star databases.

Oh! and the ability to hop in a simulated space-ship, glide out of the solar system in real time, watching the stars that make up our familiar sky disappear, quite spectacularly three dimensional too, in their relatively correct coordinates as far as I can tell... Then to the galactic scale;

... A quick picture I captured from an OOM zoom-out, to see the distribution of galaxies in three dimensions (not 100% accurate considering the physics involved but it fits pretty well with observation...) .. The Milky Way's labeled red with the rest of our local group in the center somewhere indiscernible...
Observable simulated universe.jpg
...

The addition of User albums and the image databases made it all worth while in the long run to learn, to compile a nice educational tool for the kids...

The Milky Way galaxy is a barred spiral, as Celestia shows.

By fiddling with automag and the magnitude display limit, and then zooming in on a selected area of sky, you should be able to get a good view of some of the 10000 galaxies in Celestia. I confess it's not something I've tried to do. Of course by the time you get far enough out for a global view like amzirak's, the individual galaxies are far too faint to see at all. But turning on galaxy labels with the magnitude limit set as dim as it goes should help convince you there's a lot of stuff out there: you'll get an array of galaxy labels very similar in arrangement to amzirak's view.

Grant Hutchison

I have heard many fine reviews of Starry Night as well (although I have seen some push it beyond its intended limits). The image you posted, amzirak, reminds me of a very similar looking one achieved using Partiview with the SDSS4 database (Sloan Digital Sky Survey). Partiview was developed by the Hayden Planetarium and is not particularly user friendly as a star map or planetarium type program. I believe it is intended to provide visualization of various kinds of particle physics. When used in conjunction with the databases and files of the Digital Universe Atlas for Partiview, it provides stunning 3D graphics (also to the limits of Hipparcos). I don't necessary recommend it for general use, but some may want to check it out because of its versatility and user extensibility. Also, the source code may be downloaded under the GNU license, I believe. (Oh...and everything's free as well)

Checkout partiview at this link: http://haydenplanetarium.org/universe/partiview/

LouisWu,
The Milky Way also has a vest halo.

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson