Category Archives: 3d modelling

3d modelling, astronomy
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from Digital Universe
from Digital Universe (Hayden Planetarium, American Museum of Natural History

I’ve been traveling through space on my desktop computer again. Not with the usual desktop planetarium (of which my two current favorites remain Cartes du Ciel and The Sky,) but with a very cool 3D space exploration program from the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium called “Digital Universe.”

Although the program may look daunting at first, the imagery and 3D exploratory ability it delivers to your desktop is worth learning to use the interface. It took me maybe an hour to figure it all out, and the documentation walked me through the process nicely. It also delivers a lot of background science to help you understand what you’re seeing and exploring.

So, sometimes I’m flying along exploring the Hyades or the galaxy’s open clusters, or I’m out there beyond our galaxy, exploring the large-scale structure of the universe. And, then it hits me — I’m checking out state-of-the-art astronomy databases on my two-year-old Dell desktop! How cool is that?

The software explores a bunch of databases, including the 2DF Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, in addition to the usual star, cluster, and nebula databases.

It’s great fun to explore, and the AMNH folks have included some helpful material for educators interested in turning their students on to the Digital Universe. Check it out!

3d modelling

Where Are We?

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Step outside on a clear dark night and you see what looks like a flat backdrop of stars, looking like a dome of pinpoints overhead. It’s hard to imagine that what you’re seeing has any 3D aspect to it. Of course, everything in the universe is arrayed in three dimensions, but still, it’s a hard concept to grasp sometimes.

http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/index.html
Explore the Universe in 3D

So, I ran across the website linked above. It gives you a 3D “feel” for the cosmos, in increasing steps and orders of magnitude out to the most distant objects ever seen. It’s way cool and you should take some time to investigate the maps.

That page led me to other cosmic mapping pages. This one takes you out through the large-scale structure of the universe by showing maps of “relatively nearby” galaxies (NOT as far as we can see, but far enough out to start to see patterns in the structure of the universe).

2Mass Views the Universe
2Mass Views the Universe

Another set of maps on the 2MASS website (2MASS stands for 2-Micron All-Sky Survey), shows the universe out to various distances, but in infrared wavelengths. You can see even more structure in these views.

As long as people have been able to stand out under the stars at night and look up, we’ve wondered about where we are and where we’re going. Cosmic mapping tells us a lot about where we are, and in fact, where other things are in the cosmos. And, we’re just now figuring out how big it all is, how fast it’s traveling, and where it’s all going. Stay tuned!