'Explore The Galaxy' From The Comfort Of Your Internet Browser

 

As a continued testament to the power of current generation web technologies, a Chrome-experiment dubbed ‘100,000 Stars’ lets you explore our local cluster and the Milky Way beyond, all from the comfort of your browser.

The experiment, sufficient to say, is visually stunning, where you can ‘travel’ from a close-up look at the Sun, to our own fair planet, all the way out to an artists’ rendition of the Milky Way itself. Like our look at Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s incredibly-ambitious three-dimensional ‘Map of the Universe’, the effect is quite something, allowing us to get a sense (however slight) of how massive the galaxy really is, and one which lets us revel in its beauty.

Reminding us of the aptly-titled ‘Universe Sandbox’, while ‘100,000 Stars’ isn’t as detailed, like the aforementioned, it’s the kind of tool that is both educational – information about individual stars and planets alike is provided by none other than Wikipedia – and truly engrossing.

Harvey McDaniel

Source: Chrome Experiments