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The Sun's interaction with its surrounding material
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In this
still image from the computer animation
shown at the Astrobiology Symposium and linked below, we see
the bowshock, heliopause and termination shock
of the heliosphere, with the Orion
constellation peeking through the tail of
the heliosphere. The heliosphere is the
solar wind's "bubble," elongated because both the
Sun and surrounding interstellar cloud
move through our local galactic neighborhood. (Heliosphere
geometric model courtesy of Timur Linde, University of Chicago.)
The image at the left appeared as the Astronomy Picture
of the Day,
APOD 2002 June 24,
and was used as an illustration in a recent astronomy
news article in Science Magazine, page 2005 of
Vol. 300, 27 June 2003. (The image credit is very obscure, in tiny
vertically-aligned print along the spine of page 2005.)
The narrated Heliosphere animation movie and the
Heliosphere animation without sound were developed to
accompany the
AstroBiology Symposium presentation. For additional details, see
the
displayable Technical Description in PDF or in
printable postscript.
Note: these QuickTime .mov files are 192MB and 181MB long,
respectively. Some users may need to increase their disk
cache size. |
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Satellites in our Sky (GMT June 24th 2003 2:21pm).
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We have over a thousand satellites flying through the sky over our
heads; this image is from a
brief animation representing a user's interaction with
our Earthday graphics program. The animation
shows a large portion of the satellites at a
selected time, and then zooms in for a closeup of the International
Space station (ISS).
We can clearly see the ring structure of geo-stationary (deep-space) satellites
rotating with the Earth, located 38,500km
above the Earth's surface (about 6 times the radius of the Earth).
The entire animation appeared as the Astronomy Picture
of the Day on 14 July 2003. See
APOD 2003 July 14.
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The "Cosmic Clock"
Visualization of the Universe
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Observing the Universe using the
finite speed of light to place measured objects in their correct
temporal context.
The
Cosmic Bloom (29.6MB) excerpt from the movie is available here;
it seems to play OK on PC's with QuickTime, but has troubles
on some other platforms.
This 3:35 minute
animation contains a visualization of the entire Universe from
three different points of view: the time spectrum of observable
photon radiation arriving at the earth, the constant-time shells
of light sources represented in "comoving coordinates "
(as though the Universe had always been the size it is today),
and in "physical coordinates" (which
incorporate the Hubble expansion since the "Great Flash",
when the Universe was about 300,000 years old). This film was
one of a select few chosen for showing at
the Siggraph 2000 Electronic Theater in July 2000, and
appears in
Siggraph Video Review 134, Scene 5 (2000).
To obtain a copy, please use the
Siggraph Video Review Order Form. |
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Photorealistic Star Rendering
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Seeing the Stars.
An example of our work on star rendering
may be found in this QuickTime movie:
panning across the galactic plane (158MB), with the Milky Way
image of Axel Mellinger in the background.
Compare the appearance of the simulated stars
to real images such as Akira Fujii's
Orion.
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