An updated view of the current state of the 3D Star Browser in Avalon

Chris Sells referred to my early screenshots (post 1, post 2) and commented on the way the stars were lined up 🙂 There is a good reason the stars look like that in those screenshots. I was using the personal version of the SDSS DR1 data (MySkyServer) that only include few tens of thousands of stars from a particular part of the sky. When, after the calculations of their distances, those stars are put in 3D, they appear as if they are all aligned in a single cone with its top representing earth (the position of the SLOAN telescope).

For my most recent tests (the queries are done by a background worker), I downloaded more stars from all around the sky. So, here’s how it looks in 3D with ~7,000 stars only. Again, note that the centre of the 3D space here is meant to be the SLOAN telescope (earth) while the camera is positioned to circle at a few thousands parsecs away (of course you don’t see the camera movement from this still 🙂

I am currently working on performance enhancements and the necessary logic to allow for lazy loading of the stars as the user moves the camera in 3D.