Kevin JardineJul 30, 2024
Galaxy Map

Fantastic news: Meta has approved the Virtual Starship app (and about a month earlier than I was expecting).

Before I release it I am redoing most of the sky boxes to use the latest Hunt and Reffert cluster catalog, the very detailed Edenhofer dust extinction grid, and a new selection of about 1.4 million luminous stars.

Here's the new sky box for the Messier 67 region. It will of course look far more spectacular in VR as an 8K image projected on the entire sky sphere! #astronomy

Jul 29, 2024 at 4:23pmWeb
Show threadGalaxy MapJul 29, 2024
Messier 67 is one of the oldest known open star clusters at about 4 billion years. Most star clusters don't last nearly so long because they are ripped apart by the gravity of the surrounding stars. M67 survived because it drifted well above the galactic plane but even so Gaia observations show that it is elongated: a sign that it is slowly being stretched apart.
Show threadGalaxy MapJul 29, 2024
My model of the Milky Way (with stars, dust, nebulae and glowing blue hot star density meshes) sits inside a very large Blender file. Even with my super fast Nvidia Titan RTX graphics card it takes an hour or more to generate an equirectangular sky box for each of the 45 regions.
Show threadBob DavidsonJul 29, 2024

@galaxy_map @nyrath

you worried me that the Milky Way was in a large Blender! Will it Blend?