Graphic - Suggested Enhancement
25 Jun 2005 19:02:45 UTC
Topic 189417
(moderation:
I was wondering if a dynamic graphic could be generated that would show the relative positions of the pulsars in "3-D" - that is, a "zoomable" graphic with the ability to "toggle" information (such as constellaton lines and names, star names, etc.). An example of the type of "zooming" graphic that I am referring to can be found at: http://deepimpact.umd.edu/amateur/where_is.shtml .
Graphic - Suggested Enhancement
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Myself, I picked up Starry Night's Galaxy Explorer, which lets you zoom in on galaxies, and objects in the galaxy for ten bucks.
I read that someone wrote a Starry Night plugin for the seti classic software (I guess they extracted the angle info from the workunit, formatted the text a certain way and plugged the info into Starry night.) Starry night has a Software Developer Kit.
http://www.starrynight.com/seti/
I don't run seti, so I haven't tried it with Starry night to tell if it's any good.
There is also Celestia...
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There is also Celestia... it's free and has incredibly awesome graphics and visualization features.
If anyone is tracking the development of the Planet Quest (@home?) project... it will have the ability to download the star/planet maps that it develops straight into Celestia for instant viewing of the objects it finds.
Any of the known pulsars and binaries may already be catalogued in one of the many free data files created for it.
Even without the pulsars, I could spend hours completely intrigued while "flying" around the solar system.
Edit: Celestia developers have a nice habit of keeping up with new discoveries... In fact, I just found a data file for the X-J0806 white dwarf pair to download at the bottom of the page.
"No, I'm not a scientist... but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express."
Looks like the Celestia site
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Looks like the Celestia site is back online.
There's a sourceforge page as well.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/