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Great visualization, though (ironically, as one of the first Chrome experiments) the music no longer works on Chrome by default (go to site settings > sound and set it to "Allow" to hear it), and it is somewhat outdated now (for example, it states that no exoplanets have been discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri (and that the 'proposed' JWST is required to find these planets)).
When I first went to Josemar bank as a kid there was a display talking about how exploits may theoretically exist. This would have been early 1990s.
I went a few years ago with my kids, about the same age I was, and they had a counter which was in the thousands.
Why does it zoom the wrong way around? Scrolling up means "zoom in" not "zoom out".
I dunno, it works just fine with my intuition — which is that you're not zooming as such; rather, by swiping up / scrolling the page down, you're moving a camera "forward" / "deeper in", toward the stars at the centermost part of the cube. The UI then reacts by re-framing (zooming) to capture and center in the view frustum, the volume of space that's between you and that centermost point.
I think early versions of Google Earth (predating pinch-to-zoom) worked this way, too? In that scrolling "down" meant descending from space "down" to Earth — and thus zooming in.
That makes sense to me I think! In things going back as far as command and conquer, mousewheel up zooms in, and mousewheel down zooms out.
It also gets pinch and spread gestures back to front, so it seems someone just got a sign wrong somewhere.
Yeah I had this same problem. Could be because of my experience playing space sims.
Enjoyed playing around the visualization to get a better mental picture of Earth's neighborhood. it's mind-blowing to know that there are 200 to 400 billion stars just in our galaxy alone. And it's even more breath-taking to comprehend that our galaxy is but one of a ≥100 billion galaxies in the _observable_ universe.
So about 4 × 10^22 stars in the observable universe, then?
A huge number compared to the number of values that can be stored in a 64-bit integer (1.8 × 10^19).
But a tiny number compared to the number of atoms in a human body (7 × 10^27).
Seems awesome, but unfortunately a bit glitchy on mobile. It'll pop open info panels even when I just mean to pan and I've not found a way to leave the info panels without a reload.
This is pretty old, I think those are the webgl demos for Chrome back then.
I like this visualization, but it got me thinking about how we often portray the universe in media. It seems like we always end up with the same message: 'Look how small and insignificant we are.' It's like we're drawn to the idea that our existence is just a tiny blip on the universe's radar.I think this perspective is a bit one-dimensional. It seems almost nihilistic.
It’s actually comforting to non-believers in a way that religion is to believers. Except it has the benefit of being obviously true.
> Look how small and insignificant we are ..... It seems almost nihilistic.
It isn't nihilistic. It is a simple fact.
As an aside, if you have not yet listened to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy radio plays (and you should!) you will know this is a major plot device.
It depends - that may be the takeaway that's meant to be taken away, but it's almost always "look how much we're loved" from my frame of reference.
This is great! One request would be for the smoothing when zoomed out to not generate square pixels.
Example: https://imgur.com/a/lRrHHTJ
Last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30850625 (81 comments)
Still crazy after all these years...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4784821
Perhaps update the title with (2012)?
I miss playing Elite Dangerous
I love the concept of ED and spent many an hour exploring. But when you have a full size galaxy, everything gets fairly repetitive after a while.
I had a lot of hope for KSP2 and everything that was on the roadmap. Nowhere near a galaxy scale, but much more realistic combined with having to build all of the infrastructure to reach the nearest star. Maybe one day we'll get a game that delivers without being shut down.
It worked beautifully on Linux and then an update broke it!
Curious -- how do we get information about the thickness/shape of the galactic plane from observations within the plane?
A whole bunch of assumptions, mostly of the form “what other things look like from far away is probably what we look like from far away”. And “there probably isn’t anything that makes our perspective different from others”. We can’t test these, of course. But people are happy to assume them because without that there isn’t a field.
Very nice simulation, the only snag is when rendering on iPhone, the stop/skip button cover some of the text
There is such immense stored power in the universe, yet humans are struggling to harness even a tickle of the suns power via solar panels. Put into perspective of our galaxy, there is hardly no power difference between us and ants. Wild!
Very well made in terms of visualizing scale. Scroll not working on Firefox (Windows).
What tools or techniques do you think the developers used to build this ?
Probably something like threejs. Some custom shaders maybe.
This is really impressive. It's not important, but I kinda wish the constellations could be optionally overlaid onto the visualization somehow.
They largely wouldn’t translate to the pseudo-3d space… Constellations are a side-effect of the night sky being functionally 2D from our cosmically-speaking singular viewpoint.
Didn’t manage to close the cookie banner before the intro started playing on top of it on my mobile screen. Great “experiment”, Google.
There's one direction in which I see one very bright glare. What is special about it?
This seems to be totally incorrect as the constellations are completely unrecognizable.
From what I can tell, Earth is not the POV.
Where does the data come from for this? The Gaia satellite database?
It might be the hygdata set which can be found here: https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database
It currently says it has the "Hipparcos-Yale-Gliese" database, with 119,614 stars and the "Tycho-2/Gaia" subset with 118,971 stars. That seems pretty close to the numbers quoted in the demo.
I used it previously for a matrix math conversion project translating the NIST JAMA library into a Javascript library.
If interested, the test page as a githack link can be found here. Click the "Run 3D Ellipse Fitting on Nearby (100 LY) Stellar Data". My example only uses the 25,000 out to 100 LY.
https://rawcdn.githack.com/conceptualGabrielPutnam/JAMA4JS/2...
Looks cool, but scroll wheel isn't doing anything.
Extremely cool, made me clean my screen.
Why can't cookies be rejected?
Because you're supposed to use Firefox with a plugin like uMatrix or NoScript to block cookies regardless of the website's "legitimate" practices. Protip: 90%+ of websites work great without cookies.
And, you can do other things like... block scripts from phishy domains like google.com.
Isn't the sun's name sol?
Holy shit, this is incredible. Thanks for making it!
I thought a project on GitHub reached 100k stars… I need to touch more grass.
I saw "Chrome experiments" and "100k stars" and figured it was about some popular feature that Google was dragging their heels on like JPEG XL.
I did too.
Came here to say that. The stars on this site looks cool tho.