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Gaia Sky is an open-source astronomy visualisation desktop and VR program with versions for Windows, Linux and macOS. It is created and developed by Toni Sagristà Sellés in the framework of ESA 's Gaia mission to create a billion-star multi-dimensional map of our Milky Way Galaxy, in the Gaia group of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ZAH ...
The Milky Way [c] is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye.
Website. worldwidetelescope .org. WorldWide Telescope ( WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, [4] [5] originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. [6]
The Milky Way has several smaller galaxies gravitationally bound to it, as part of the Milky Way subgroup, which is part of the local galaxy cluster, the Local Group.. There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years) of the Milky Way, but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies.
The Laniakea Supercluster ( / ˌlɑːni.əˈkeɪ.ə /; Hawaiian for "open skies" or "immense heaven") [2] is the galaxy supercluster that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. It was defined in September 2014, when a group of astronomers including R. Brent Tully of the University of Hawaiʻi, Hélène ...
In astronomy, the Great Rift (sometimes called the Dark Rift or less commonly the Dark River) is a dark band caused by interstellar clouds of cosmic dust that significantly obscure ( extinguish) the center and most radial sectors of the Milky Way galaxy from Earth 's perspective. In dark, clear night skies, the rift appears as clear as the ...
The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy 's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles. In actual usage, the terms galactic plane and galactic poles usually refer specifically to the plane and poles of the Milky Way, in which Planet Earth is located.
Digital Universe Atlas is a free open source software planetarium application, available under the terms of the Illinois Open Source License, and running on Linux, Windows, macOS (10.5 and above), AmigaOS 4, and IRIX . It is a standalone 4-dimensional space visualization application built on the programmable Partiview data visualization engine ...
For example, the nearest star to the Earth after the Sun is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light-years (4.0 × 10 13 km; 2.5 × 10 13 mi) or 30 million (3 × 10 7) solar diameters away. To visualize that scale, if the Sun were a ping-pong ball , Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1,100 km (680 mi) away, and the Milky Way would be about 30 ...
Nightshade is a simulation and visualization software for teaching and exploring astronomy, Earth science, and related topics. Its focus is on use in digital planetarium systems or as an educational tool, [1] with additional features to allow it to also be used on desktop or laptop computers. It operates on Linux, macOS and Windows .