NAM logo, by David Le Conte

Constellations and the supercluster of galaxies in stereo

C.J. Baddiley

A program was written some years ago on a domestic computer, for educational purposes, to illustrate constellations in depth. This program can access a 1/4 million star data base with distance and velocity colour and brightness information. It can display star fields to magnitude 9, in near true colour, or in red-green stereo for use with stereo viewing. The program performs polar to Cartesian transforms and matrix rotation and displacement operations, and re-mapping to polars for viewing. Distances are logarithmically compressed, other parameters are undistorted.

The viewer can effectively fly through star fields, or rotate or time shift constellations, as required.

A similar program displays from a data base of 13000 known redshift galaxies. Views of the Supercluster, and also sections of it, can be displayed in a various projections, Chains and ribbons of galaxies are clearly visible, either colour coded for Hubble classification, or for redshift, or in red green stereo. In another version of the program, galaxy clusters can be viewed in close up from any location.

Screen frames are shown, taken from a slide set often used in popular lectures.

Maintained by Ian Howarth