Starry Night: Hyper-Cosmos

Mark Pesce just turned me on to the most amazing piece of software I've come across in years. It's called Starry Night.

It starts out innocent enough. You pick your location on earth, and it places you on the ground looking up towards the night sky as it is at this very moment. And this is where the true magic begins. As you zoom in and out of the sky, you are able to look at thousands of stars and other phenomena.

Within 15 minutes I was able to spot the International Space Station as it is orbiting the earth right now. At the moment of this post (11:42pm) it was coming over the Pacific towards the South American Coast at 18,000 mph. Keep in mind this simulation is in real-time!! Within a few more minutes I found dozens of satellites orbiting the earth. Then as I pointed further outward I was able to zoom in on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, etc. I was able to see Uranus as it would look from earth at this exact moment in time.

All this was occurring from the ground of my hometown. Then I discovered the Spaceship Mode! I flew away from the earth. First I started heading away at a few km/sec and noticed I was getting anywhere very fast. So I sped up to 1000km/sec and I noticed that I was now slowly approaching the moon. I passed around the moon, and noticed that the dark side is fully lit, as it is located between the sun and earth at this moment. I sped up further and flew out towards Jupiter. I was traveling at about 10 times the speed of light, and it still was taking me at least several minutes to get there, so I sped up to about 500 times the speed of light and saw Jupiter and all of its moons approaching rapidly. I slowed down and approached Europa within about 10,000 km. Amazingly all the detail from the Galileo Probe was right there in front of me!

I sped up further, this time heading out into the galaxy at 100,000 times the speed of light, within a minute or so I was passing Sirius, then I turned and headed towards Procyon, then Vega, and then further out still. And then I was hooked! The free version came to an end. But what an amazing ride. To see more I would need to purchase the full version with all the plugins. Luckily I got some money for Christmas so I purchased as my Christmas present.

Now I loaded the program again, and now there were over a hundred thousand stars to view up to 11th magnitude. Better still, I was able to leave the galaxy altogether and venture out into the local cluster. I first visited the Larger Magellenic Cloud, then to Andromeda, and then further still to the Virgo Cluster, where there are hundreds of galaxies. Starry Night uses OpenGL to render all these objects in beautiful 3 dimensions. So here I was flying like in the TV show Cosmos at millions of times the speed of light past galaxies.

StarryNight goes much further still. All of these stars, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters are all identifiable thru the options. As I fly around in my super-fast spaceship I can see all the objects and their names. The most amazing thing about it is all these objects are actually moving, since this is a real-time simulation. At one point I was near Io, and when I sped up the clock by x3000 times I watched as Jupiter and all its moons sped away from me. I could see all the moons rapidly orbiting the planet at high speed, as if I was actually there.

Also included with Starry Night are hundreds of Hubble images to enhance the zoom-in experience.

I cannot recommend this product highly enough!

Posted by paul at January 8, 2005 11:42 PM | TrackBack