Surf The Galaxy On Your Home Computer

Images from the Digital Universe provided by Carter Emmart © 2004 American Museum of Natural History

Imagine that you could travel to the Big Dipper in a faster-than-light spaceship that could take you there in less than a minute. At the beginning of your journey, the small group of seven bright stars takes its familiar shape: three stars for the handle, four stars for the bowl of the dipper. Some of those stars, of course, are actually closer than others. So as you leave our solar system and approach the Dipper, its outlines become distorted. You pass the nearest star, then the second-nearest, the third, and now, with the seven stars all around you, it hardly makes sense to think of them as a dipper at all. They have become just a collection of stars.

Until recently, a trip to the Big Dipper could take place only in one’s imagination. But now, powerful new tools have been created that enable you to experience such an interstellar journey on a laptop computer, with an accuracy as pinpoint as modern astrophysics can provide.

The possibility of taking such a virtual tour of the universe in three dimensions has been realized by the NASA-supported Digital Universe atlas, developed by the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. Depending on your taste and the time you devote to your tour, the Digital Universe can carry you anywhere—from the orbits of the innermost planets, to the stars that form the constellations, to the galactic neighborhood of our own Milky Way, to the most distant known objects in the universe.

To pilot your own space flight and change course whenever you like, you can download the free software and catalog of celestial objects over the Internet.

www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/du/download.html

Now the look and feel of our stellar and galactic neighborhoods have become accessible not only to the professional astronomer, but to virtually everyone.