10 ms·
ESASky
- brink 2y agoAll these stars, and every one of them is unique. It boggles the mind.
- diggan 2y ago> every one of them is unique How sure of this are we? Feels like we've can only confirm that's true for a small selection of the vast total.
- chrisan 2y agoThink of them like snowflakes
- recursive 2y agoSo not all unique.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Etheryte 2y agoTo quote [0]: > Although snowflakes are all the same on an atomic level (they are all made of the same hydrogen and oxygen atoms), it is almost impossible for two snowflakes to form complicated designs in exactly the same way. While snowflakes can be sorted into about forty categories, scientists estimate that there are up to 10^158 snowflake possibilities. (That’s 10^70 times more designs than there are atoms in the universe!) [0] https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/are-all-snowflakes-really-different-science-winter https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/are-all-snowflakes-real...
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoSure, but you could say the same for white t shirts.
- recursive 2y agoI don't think this is what people are talking about when they say "no two snowflakes are the same". Treated this way, no two of anything could ever be the same. Why even bother having the word "same"?
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoWe can’t really confirm it for anything. It’s all up to the axioms you choose. Equally reasonable ones would have them all distinct, uniform, and everything in between.
- pantalaimon 2y agoOnly the sharp dots are stars - all those fuzzy little orbs in the background are galaxies
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- butz 2y ago"ESASky is an application that allows you to visualise and download public astronomical data."
- yuumei 2y agoBeautiful, but could do with using quaternions for rotation to avoid gimbal lock. At least I assume that’s the problem with getting stuck on the poles
- sigmoid10 2y agoFor interactive navigation on a sphere (remember, this is just a sphere looked at from the inside) you actually want absolute euler angle based rotations, otherwise compound rotations around any closed loop on the sphere's surface will change the orientation of the camera and make further navigation extremely confusing. Source: many years spent designing 3d applications. Also, Google Earth and every other major app do it the same way.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LegionMammal978 2y agoIm fact, if you zoom out all the way, you'll see that we're actually looking at a sphere from the outside, as if the stars are situated on a celestial globe. It seems to be a relatively common convention for interactive night-sky maps.
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoInverting the Z axis purely as a UI quirk/implementation detail is one thing, but more interesting would be to embrace it as a means of representing the time scale of the universe - as you zoom into the earth, you zoom into the deeply redshifted ancient data, which conveniently is from a smaller universe so projecting it onto a smaller shell of the sphere makes sense. Until you reach the core, which is a picture of the cosmic background radiation.
- Jimiliyaa 2y ago[flagged]
- amelius 2y agoHow fixed is all this? It would be nice if we could scroll through time.
- crote 2y agoPretty much everything beyond our solar system is essentially fixed on a human timescale. Over 2000 years, a typical star will move about half a degree. That's the width of the moon in the sky. There are of course notable exceptions like Barnard's Star, whose movement is pretty obvious on photographs taken over several decades. If you want to explore how space changes over time, I recommend you look into something like Celestia[0]. It allows you to simulate star movement over thousands of years, and show you how the night sky looked to the Ancient Egyptians. [0]: https://celestiaproject.space/ https://celestiaproject.space/
- kuschku 2y agoSome what related, two awesome links: Nearest star to us, over time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NearSunStarsSimple.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NearSunStarsSimple.j... Star closest to the north pole, over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star#cite_ref-Meeus_6-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star#cite_ref-Meeus_6-2
- arendtio 2y agoWhen I scroll out, I would expect to reach a point close to Earth or our solar system, but somehow, I look at a sphere from the outside.
- nativeit 2y agoYou are The One.
- elliotto 2y agoA fun fact I learned while visiting the Globe Museum in Vienna, is that they used to make globes in pairs; one would be a globe of the Earth, and the other would be a Celestial Globe which is a projection of the sky onto a sphere. What you're seeing is a celestial globe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_globe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_globe
- bscphil 2y agoIt's just a projection, you're looking at the sphere of the sky as seen from a (stabilized) Earth position. When you zoom out, you increase your field of view beyond that of the human eye to encompass the whole sphere. Because there's no way to compress a sphere into a plane, you have to choose a projection; this is a common projection (stereographic) which lets you zoom out as far as 180 degrees, by presenting the field of view as if it were the surface of a sphere as seen from an infinite distance.
- bongwater_OS 2y ago[flagged]
- cydodon 2y agowell... it's not always night time... it's not always clear skies.. it's not often that a power outage happens in my city to actually see the stars...
- crote 2y agoTo get a halfway-decent view of the night sky I'd have to drive about an hour away from my home. To get a good view of the night sky I'd have to fly to another country half a continent away.
- lukevp 2y agoWhere do you live that you don’t have a good view of the sky within your country?
- TeMPOraL 2y agoEurope, I guess. Lots of technologically advanced countries with high urbanization rates and population density, none of the large swathes of undeveloped land in the middle like the US enjoys.
- nativeit 2y agoIf this even remotely resembled “looking at the sky” I seriously doubt there would be much demand or response to it. Fortunately, for the less incurious among us anyway, that’s not what’s happening here.
- nativeit 2y agoTo quote the immortal @butz quoting the very front page of the link… > ESASky is an application that allows you to visualise and download public astronomical data.
- 2y ago
- hoppushoppard 2y agoI found some kind of artifact @ 70.3169798 +19.0238259 FOV: 1.3°x2.4°. What is that? Some kind of antenna?
- Ladsko 2y agoI think it is the shadow or a reflection of the camera itself within the telescope. It's visible in multiple places. https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/telescopes/images/PTFcameraInstall.jpg https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/about/telescopes/ima...
- mnadkvlb 2y agoexactly. I see it as well in multiple other spots as well. eg: 1. 05 49 04.008 +01 09 47.27 FoV: 1.3° X 2.2° 2. 05 44 35.074 +01 52 52.36 FoV: 3.4° X 5.9° 3. 06 37 17.795 -47 18 20.97 FoV: 1.4° X 2.4° many more that i didnt list.
- dackle 2y ago[dead]
- bradknowles 2y agoNot nearly as easy to navigate and discover as apps like Stellarium. Now, if they had the database with hundreds of terabytes of objects that NASA has for their OpenUniverse simulation they’re running for the upcoming Roman space telescope (see https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-roman-mission-gets-cosmic-sneak-peek-from-supercomputers https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-roman-mission-gets-cosmi...), then maybe I could understand why it is so confusing. As it is, I don’t really understand why it has to be so confusing.
- aadhavans 2y agoAgreed, especially with regards to Stellarium, although this seems more of a researcher's tool than a hobbyist's tool. There's an excellent web version of Stellarium, if anyone's interested: https://stellarium-web.org/ https://stellarium-web.org/
- sroussey 2y agoWow, so many Starlink satellites overhead!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aragilar 2y agoI'm confused why you think this is confusing? Stellarium is something you use to point a telescope with (and more focused on amateurs), whereas esasky is designed to browse through objects/images/spectra (with science data for scientists)? I don't know how much the overall data would be (given esasky is using a bunch of astronomy standards would be), but we're at least in 100s of PBs here.
- bradknowles 2y agoI don’t see evidence of 100s of PB of data here. I do see multiple green stars, which I know is extremely rare in the real world. That’s just not a common color spectrum for stars. And using a viewpoint of a large sphere from the outside just seems wrong. It should be viewed from the inside.
- moffkalast 2y agoDoes anyone know what's the deal with the fairly consistent discoloration of the individual images? The edges are often orange and the middle blue. You'd think they'd colour correct this out when doing the stitching... Also, are these [0] artefacts a result of adaptive optics since they shine out those lasers to keep track of distortions? And these [1] which seem to be the same but larger and less focused. I remember seeing similar ones on Google Sky years back but never really figured out what causes it. [0] https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=94.25875681534997%2020.972184264700275&hips=DSS2+color&fov=3.124703578686123&cooframe=J2000&sci=true&lang=en https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=94.25875681534997%2020.97... [1] https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=218.7659069213465%20-59.64002122120938&hips=DSS2+color&fov=2.7157181080968167&cooframe=J2000&sci=true&lang=en https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=218.7659069213465%20-59.6...
- cess11 2y agoMaybe you could link to the images themselves rather than positions on the ESASky map? Those positions are associated with hundreds of thousands of images.
- moffkalast 2y agoDoes it not open properly on your end? The artefacts seem pretty glaringly obvious in those locations and I've tested the links in another browser to make sure it's not caching the zoom or whatever. What you see when you load is the image I'd take. Anyhow, whoever can actually answer will surely know which ones I mean.
- cess11 2y agoAren't you referring to just the map? You find the images under a menu in the upper left corner.
- xioxox 2y agoLikely a "ghost" caused by a reflection from a bright star somewhere in the instrument: https://www.eso.org/%7Eohainaut/images/imageProc.html https://www.eso.org/%7Eohainaut/images/imageProc.html
- xvilka 2y agoI wish there was something for 3D level of exploration, preferably open source, something like Stellarium but in 3D, something similar to the navigation interface[1] in the Expanse TV series. [1] https://www.joycenho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EXP-Still-2.jpg https://www.joycenho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EXP-Stil...
- allanrbo 2y agohttps://spaceengine.org/ https://spaceengine.org/ , though it’s partially fictional if I recall correctly. Edit: oh and not OSS. Misremembered.
- gnomewascool 2y agoI'm not quite sure what your exact specifications are, but I think that Celestia[0] fits? [0] https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia
- aragilar 2y agoSince no one has explained what esasky is: esasky allows professional astronomers (and anyone else because astronomy is all about open science) to view science observations from observatories across the world in one place. If you look in the top-left corner you'll see a bunch of controls. The first one (with three layers) chooses what is displayed. You can choose from loads of surveys (some which cover the whole sky, others that only cover a part) at loads of different wavelengths (and because the sky does change, search for LSST, there's an implicit time aspect as well). These are the original images (ignoring the underlying reduction process each survey does), these are for science not outreach. This is the button to play with (see how the same spot looks in visible vs. radio vs. x-ray). Next button allows you to pick specific observations (as the all-sky part has implications about how you tessellate images), not that useful unless you understand what you're doing in more details than I have space for. After that is catalogues of objects. This information will be compiled by survey teams, and is derived from various sources (including other catalogues). The magical astronomy keyword here is "TAP" for Table Access Protocol. Spectra and timeseries is the next button, you're (generally) looking at spectra/timeseries from individual objects here, but things get more complex here. The remaining buttons are really of no interest outside the profession sphere (though the multi-messager (i.e. not light, think gravitational waves/neutrinos etc.) button might be interesting when LIGO is running). (I'm an astronomy RSE, but I don't work on esasky, nor for ESA).