Starship Asterisk*

The lockdown has finally given me the time I need / a good excuse to learn how to bring my 3D content online. Here's an interactive model of the Virgo cluster, showing 774 galaxies in 3D. It's a 90 MB page so may take a while to load. It should work fine on mobile devices, but viewing 774 galaxies o...

A VR flight through the Universe, using real data from the ALFALFA survey and Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 30,086 galaxies all shown using their correct, unique images, with the camera moving at a speed equivalent to 500 trillion times faster than light. You'll need a headset to view this in its full g...

Well, this one doesn't have any dinosaurs in it at all, but it does have 1998QE2, its moon, and a space station.

http://zoom.it/l3ue

The zoomable versions have changed because there was an error in the size of a light year. It isn't 9 billion kilometers (which would be smaller than the solar system !!! :oops: ) it's 9 trillion. I guess removing the offending images breaks zoomit, so here are the new links. http://zoom.it/zQuq htt...

Yes, I am he. :) I don't know why the images should be blocked for "code of conduct" violations... maybe it's because I removed the original images (I don't know how zoomit works exactly, perhaps they require the originals to be accessible ?). Anyway the links in the original blog post do ...

Thanks ! You're right, it should stay central. I think it's because of small numerical errors which are increased because the program was never designed to have 90% of the mass suddenly removed. Apparently the first run generated 10GB of error messages, which is clearly not a sign of a happy program...

This may be of interest. It's a simulation a friend ran for me (because I asked nicely) showing what would happen to a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy if it suddenly and magically lost all of its dark matter. I've always wanted to see this, because I've been telling people for years that without dark ...

Comparing the relative size of galaxies using public domain images. Music is shareable, from http://www.danosongs.com/