APOD: Virtual Flyby of the Whirlpool Galaxy (2019 May 06)

[TheZuke!]

I'm french and I hope you will excuse my poor English.
[...] Second, the flyby takes about one minute and the galaxy is thousand light-years large, so our virtual speed is millions time the light speed ! [...]

Godspeed!

[jwgeddis@gmail.com]

a bit disappointing compared to other NASA animated flyby's. The was a simple 2 layer animation with the background stars separated and at a constant distance and with the foreground galaxy zoomed at a constant rate. It would have been an assignment for a first semester animation student. Choice of dramatic music way exceeded any drama of the video....

[yetagain]

Cheesy Star Trek music

[geckzilla]

a bit disappointing compared to other NASA animated flyby's. The was a simple 2 layer animation with the background stars separated and at a constant distance and with the foreground galaxy zoomed at a constant rate. It would have been an assignment for a first semester animation student. Choice of dramatic music way exceeded any drama of the video....

no... it's not? That's a fully 3D galaxy using real data acquired by Hubble and you can see the parallax for a lot of the individual stars. This sort of visualization is one of the hardest to achieve because the goal is for it to be as close to reality as possible. It does look weird though because it is essentially a 2d image projected into a 3d shape. There's always room for improvement, but the constraint of avoiding simply making up data is what makes it so challenging.

[neufer]

That's a fully 3D galaxy using real data acquired by Hubble and you can see the parallax for a lot of the individual stars. This sort of visualization is one of the hardest to achieve because the goal is for it to be as close to reality as possible. It does look weird though because it is essentially a 2d image projected into a 3d shape. There's always room for improvement, but the constraint of avoiding simply making up data is what makes it so challenging.

Presumably the z-distance of individual stars out of the galactic plane is basically the result of a random number generator.

But the galactic plane itself must be considerably distorted by the interaction with NGC 5194.

I wonder if they ignored both NGC 5194 AND its distorting interactions?

[geckzilla]

All I know is they tend to utilize what data they have, and if they don't have it, they usually don't make things up. The z-distance for the stars was an acceptable compromise, I guess. Either way, I just want to emphasize that it's not easy and not a project for someone totally new to animation and modeling.