I was surprised to find that this wasn't a compilation of Sloan images, or one of the larger sky survey collaborations. This appears to be a one-person project.
I guess because the title here says "photograph" it didn't occur to me until the second visit that I could click and drag to look around. When I did though I got hit with the "Oh wow. That's incredible." sensation.
Andromeda looks actually really big!
It reminds of this post on APOD showing the apparent size compared to the moon:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html
The Andromeda Galaxy was easy to spot, but I couldn't find any of the constellations I'm familiar with (until I found the "Show Constellations and Objects" button).
Just found you can zoom with the mousewheel. Zomming in on what appears an interesting feature reveals more and more details. This is just awesome. I can't help but feel more insignificant than usual when exploring this sky map.
It'd be even cooler if there were deeper zoom levels which linked in images specifically of a particular object. Say I find and zoom in on the Horse Head Nebula I get to images of that specific object.
It would had been better if this sky map was not only Earth-centric, but also had Earth's polar coordinate system, or at least Earth's rotation axis. Here if you look "up" and rotate the sky, there isn't a North Star sitting there, and that's weird.
This is so well done - I especially like the galactic reference in the lower left corner, that shows the FOV and direction. I promise not to say anything unkind about Flash for at least a week.
I wish there was an easy way to save the current view as a PNG. I could set it to full screen and use Print Screen, but the app icon and interface buttons would need to be edited out.
1. Play Eve Online 2. Set a route going through dozens of hisec system 3. Hit Autopilot (ctrl+s) 4. Enter windowless mode (ctrl+F9) 5. Sit back and enjoy the nicest interactive screensaver
o7
Is there a reason why it appears more populated and dense in the middle as opposed to the upper or lower regions? Is that the plane of our galaxy, or something to do with the light?
It's a side view of the milky way - our galaxy. You can see it at night if you look up, and you live far away enough from a large city or light polluted area.
Imagine you are look at a CD from the center, you would see matter in the middle but not above nor below. It is a little bit the same thing except the solar system and our Earth are not located in the center of the galaxy but somewhere close to the edge.
The green line is actually the ecliptic, the path which the Sun travels on the celestial sphere. You may find all the other planets along it also, because it is coplanar with Earth's orbit around the sun and, as consequence, almost coplanar with the other planet's orbits.
So sorry. Some of us just think that if we have a standards compliant web browser we should be able to use it to view things regardless of what device it is running on.
Really? The project is an abject failure because it was made available without an Android or Windows Phone version? Sure it would be cool if it had one, but I think there are enough people out there with access to desktop browsers or iOS devices to make it at least marginally worthwhile!
I was surprised to find that this wasn't a compilation of Sloan images, or one of the larger sky survey collaborations. This appears to be a one-person project.