It’s full of stars

Written By: - Date published: 9:32 am, October 4th, 2009 - 11 comments
Categories: Deep stuff - Tags:

stars1

stars2
Maybe it would be good for my blood pressure to try not to be grumpy about politics on Sundays. So here is a site I found last week which both rekindled my sense of wonder, and re-calibrated my sense of perspective.
The site displays a full 360 degree spherical image of the night sky as seen from Earth (in the centre of the sphere).  You can use arrow keys to move your point of view in any direction, and other keys (ALT and SHIFT on a PC?) to zoom in (like the second image above) or out.  The spherical image is 800 megapixels in size, and was composed from 1,200 individual images of the night sky taken from various locations.  The site covers some background on how it was done.  Well worth a look – the closest I’ve seen so far to a total perspective vortex.

11 comments on “It’s full of stars ”

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  1. travellerev 1
    4 October 2009 at 10:39 am

    r0b,

    You da man. Awesome.
    Oh oops, first link doesn’t work. Bugger

  2. Tim Ellis 2
    4 October 2009 at 11:24 am

    Nice post r0b.

  3. the sprout 3
    4 October 2009 at 11:24 am

    great site, thanks r0b.
    if it’s a sense of wonder you’re after you really can’t go past astronomy.
    reminds me the opinion that there’s a lot more god in science than there is in most religion.

    • ghostwhowalksnz 3.1
      4 October 2009 at 12:46 pm

      There aint no God in science for very good reasons.

      • r0b 3.1.1
        4 October 2009 at 1:13 pm

        I dunno ghost, I might agree with sprout, cosmology and religion – it’s an interesting line. Alas – gotta run (again)…

      • Phil 3.1.2
        4 October 2009 at 1:57 pm

        Not ‘god’ perse, but still lots of ‘belief’.

      • the sprout 3.1.3
        4 October 2009 at 1:58 pm

        i guess that depends on your conception of god GWW, i think it’s meant from a kind of spinozian pov.

        or else the awe that can be experienced from seeing the world from even a solely empirical pov can still rival mysticism if you do it right 😉

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