First real post! I'm on fire...
I was trawling my Twitter feed before bed, and I found this link: http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/
Go drool for five or ten minutes (or half an hour, whatever) and then come back and read this.
This has to be getting more press SOMEWHERE than what it's getting on the various feeds and sites I follow. While it's not the most in-depth or scale accurate rendition of our stellar neighborhood that could be made, it's still a great tool. It helps bring the concepts of distance and size down to something more easily grasped, which is (to my mind at least) one of the major stumbling blocks people face when learning astronomy.
Numbers scare people; it's easy to become dazed when comparing millions of miles and billions of lightyears, without being able to visualize either one. I was reviewing some of the distances earlier in the year for my astrobiology class, and I sat there for...quite a while, just zooming in and out in my mind between the measures involved in the solar system, galaxy, Local Group, etc. Now, that sense of enormous distance is one of the things that makes me feel most strongly that I'm studying the "right" thing for me, but someone who's dabbling around the edges of astronomy needs something a little more hands-on and a little less terror-inducing. And (as much as I hate to pat Google on the back), I think this app does that admirably.
Which brings me to another thing I think the site does really well: it takes the emptiness out of the Universe. By focusing on i.e., stars everyone has heard of (at least every geek and sci fi fan), it shows where we are situated generally without emphasizing the immense tracts of nothing (or whatever they're calling "nothing" this week) that lie between. The comforting streak of the Milky Way that lies behind each star image reminds you of the scale while situating you firmly in something familiar, our galactic town's local landmarks.
That's enough philosophizing for the night. Til next time,
~The Clumsy Astronomer
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