Rotating Star Field

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

A tweet last night took me to a site that linked to another The Astronomy Nexus which had a handy csv file of astronomical data.  The CSV includes all stars in Hipparcos or closer than 50 parsecs to us. Thats almost 120,000 stars.  I knocked together a quick script to import the data into Vue and create an ecosystem of white billboard objects.  The static render of the whole Ecosystem looks like a lot of white dots on a black background and isn’t particularly intersting.  So I put together the little animation above of   all the stars in the dataset within 20 parsecs of the sun with the Sun at the centre rotating around which makes it a bit more intersting by showing the third dimension.

I’m working on an enhanced version of the script using spheres instead of an EcoSystem so I can add make the points more distinct.

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