Ultimate space simulation software

 
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DoctorOfSpace
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27 Sep 2017 18:40

Spacer, happens every time articles like this come around, it's pretty nice.  We have gained quite a few really good community members who found articles like this
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Quando omni flunkus, moritati
 
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Mosfet
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20 Jun 2018 16:51

Lifehacker wrote about Space Engine, as "app of the week":

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/06/explore-the-universe-with-spaceengine/
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so". Douglas N. Adams
| My mods: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=80 | My specs: Asus x555ub - cpu i5-6200u, ram 12gb, gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram |
 
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Silicon
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04 Aug 2018 21:51

 
Macronicus
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05 Aug 2018 09:34

To a Galaxy billion light-years away from a Dark World.
 
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Stellarator
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26 Aug 2018 19:13

I don't know if this counts, but the Orion's Arm Universe Project mentioned Space Engine in their world-building page: https://www.orionsarm.com/page/310, and they use SE screenshots on a few pages for descriptive purposes.
Futurum Fusionem
 
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FastFourierTransform
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03 Apr 2021 09:14

So, a few weeks ago we published a research paper about a new map of the Solar Neighbourhood using OB stars (which is the most precise to date as it seems) using data from the Gaia mission (don't worry I will make an addon for our cataog in summer when we release the second iteration of this research, with a huge increase in accuracy and the number of objects depicted in the map). Obviously as a long term SE fan I jumped inmediately and used SpaceEngine for a press release animation


[youtube]faet_rDdqEA[/youtube]

The stars colored in cyan/blue are the ones in the Orion/Local arm (the one where the Solar System is located), the ones in crimson are the ones in the Perseus arm, and the ones in purple are members of the Sagittarius arm. One of our discoveries is a new structure in the Galaxy; we call it The Cepheus Spur and is a bridge of young stellar associations between the Orion arm and the Perseus arm. You can see the Cepheus Spur marked with yellow dots in the animation. The Cepheus spur is consistently above the mid-galactic plane (something that can even be seen in the animation) which is also an interesting discovery. We believe, as other authors have noted, that there are corrugations in the Galactic disk; oscillations in the vertical spatial distribution of stars, which in turn might contain clues about past galactic collisions.

Since I work in Spain (at the Center of Astrobiology) as a student, the attention has been given mainly in the spanish media. The main newspapers of the country have shown the SpaceEngine animation or at least apart of it (El País, El Mundo, ABC, 20 minutos, AS, Público and others). Even National Geographic and RussiaToday (in English) has voiced it (albeit, sadly, with a conspiratorial headline). Finally after some interviews on the radio it has also appeared on television (I've always credited SpaceEngine and Vladimir Romanyuk for the animation but only CNN explicitly mentioned it, sorry).

CanalSur (Andalusian regional TV) [look at 0:41], Canal 24 horas (main public news channel in Spain) [look at 0:44] and CNN (in spanish) [look at 21:32]:


[youtube]6dCFIqUXI_s[/youtube]


[youtube]9vzMHbNK_6c[/youtube]



[youtube]axSVeW2KEEc[/youtube]

So that's it. I wanted to post about our work in the "Show off your work" thread but since it has jumped to the news media I think is better for you to know that SpaceEngine is being used there. Thank you Vladimir for your inmense work all these years. And sorry if I've been so absent for the past 2 years (even if I promised you that I would make sense of Gaia data for the project), but this was the thing that got me busy all this time.

As I said, I will probably build an addon of ~20.000 blue massive luminous stars in the Milky Way this summer when we update the catalog and include more precise distance estimates based on bayesian analysis of the new Gaia data. I will also try to make an addon with a better texture for the Milky Way using Robert Hurt's artistic model, which is currently the most updated and scientifically accurate artistic representation available. And if I'm able to get some time for it I will make a few articles for SpaceEngine regarding the Cosmic Distance Ladder and how we really measure distances in the Galaxy in detail.

See you soon :D
 
A-L-E-X
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Publications about SE

04 Apr 2021 01:52

wow the first video was made in space engine?  how?  I love how colorful the stars are and it looks like there is an animated H-R diagram there.  It will be fascinating if by going through all this data we find a new "most luminous star" or "most massive star"!
 
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FastFourierTransform
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04 Apr 2021 04:30

wow the first video was made in space engine?  how?
I loaded our entire dataset as an addon in SpaceEngine, making sure that all stars had unrealistically low magnitudes (so they could be seen from intergalactic distances in the animation). I turned of procedural generation of stars and erased the information inside the default catalogue star files so only my datasetwould be displayed. I then created and saved a camera path of my choice. Then I recorded it 5 different times, for each part of our dataset; for the Cepheus spur, the Orion, Perseus and Sagittarius arms, and another one without stars but with the Galaxy model activated. Then I went to SonyVegas (many video editing programs will allow this) and added the 5 clips together. I made a chroma key for the dark background in the first 4 clips to make them transparent and overlayed them on top of the Galaxy model clip. Finally I added different saturation and hue values to the 4 stars-only clips and voilá.
it looks like there is an animated H-R diagram there
No, that's not an HR diagram (the HR diagram can be found in fig 1 in the papertho). That is a Python code I did to represent the vertical distribution of stars in a scientifically meaningful manner instead of a visually realistic one. Yo can see there that the Cepheus Spur (yellow) is above the average height of the Galactic plane.
It will be fascinating if by going through all this data we find a new "most luminous star" or "most massive star"!
Indeed the most luminous and the most massive Galactic stars known are both in our catalogue. But the most luminous and most massive in general are outside our Galaxy, they can be found in the Magellanic clouds, and therefore are not included in our catalogue.
I don't want to take this off-topic, so please no questions like that in this thread (at least I won't answer them here).
 
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04 Apr 2021 11:02

Wow, nice work, and congratulations with a new discovery!
I am still far from implementing of a whole GAIA catalog support. Athough I think that SE will not use all 2 billion stars, because it can render only stars with a good parallax, luminocity and color data. What I need to implement (aside from a new dynamic octree which will support data streaming from the disk), is a conversion of color + luminosity into stellar class.
 
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FastFourierTransform
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06 Apr 2021 04:20

Wow, nice work, and congratulations with a new discovery!
Thank you Vlad :D
I am still far from implementing of a whole GAIA catalog support. Athough I think that SE will not use all 2 billion stars, because it can render only stars with a good parallax, luminocity and color data.
Yes, we will have to wait a lot for the classifiers for that. The conversion from color-luminosity diagrams to stellar class is not straightforward at all. We are searching for the OB stars (so that's something you can count on), White Dwarfs are very easy to identify (so you can count also on that), and there is a very complete and accurate stellar catalogue for the nearest 100 pc being compiled and updated (I'm lucky enought to be part of that project also). But for the rest, the A, G, K, M stars the thing is very very complicated with Gaia alone (and those are the vast majority of stars in the Galaxy). In the color-uminosity diagrams we have to account for extinction since it moves stars that are blue to the red sector and mixes with the red giant population, for example. This seems almost impossible to solve with Gaia alone (but no other astrophysical dataset contains so so many objects). Something can be done with the 2MASS cross-match, since there we have infrared photometry and that can be used to discern some of the cases. But the real breakthrough will come with Gaia DR3 (we are currently in EDR3), which will include low resolution multi-epoch spectra. Another breakthrough will occur in a decade or so (but no need to wait for that), when ESA builds and Infrarred Gaia mission. Some king of probabilistic algorithm could be made to calculate potential spectral class, by considering the relative sizes of each stellar population but we will get a lot of stars confused in that case (which might not be such a problem for a first approximation in SpaceEngine). In any case there are some crazy good news, Gaia filters have been deteriorating, and this is a very interesting thing, because their spectral sensitivity has changed and thus we might have a glimpse to some spectral lines by comparing current photometry with previous data releases. Particularly this will allow for classification of M dwarfs and more OB stars. In short: lots and lots of work from the scientific side. You have plenty of time for the programming side... no other planetarium-like software will have consistent Gaia data before yours ;)
 
A-L-E-X
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Publications about SE

06 Apr 2021 08:24

wow the first video was made in space engine?  how?
I loaded our entire dataset as an addon in SpaceEngine, making sure that all stars had unrealistically low magnitudes (so they could be seen from intergalactic distances in the animation). I turned of procedural generation of stars and erased the information inside the default catalogue star files so only my datasetwould be displayed. I then created and saved a camera path of my choice. Then I recorded it 5 different times, for each part of our dataset; for the Cepheus spur, the Orion, Perseus and Sagittarius arms, and another one without stars but with the Galaxy model activated. Then I went to SonyVegas (many video editing programs will allow this) and added the 5 clips together. I made a chroma key for the dark background in the first 4 clips to make them transparent and overlayed them on top of the Galaxy model clip. Finally I added different saturation and hue values to the 4 stars-only clips and voilá.
it looks like there is an animated H-R diagram there
No, that's not an HR diagram (the HR diagram can be found in fig 1 in the papertho). That is a Python code I did to represent the vertical distribution of stars in a scientifically meaningful manner instead of a visually realistic one. Yo can see there that the Cepheus Spur (yellow) is above the average height of the Galactic plane.
It will be fascinating if by going through all this data we find a new "most luminous star" or "most massive star"!
Indeed the most luminous and the most massive Galactic stars known are both in our catalogue. But the most luminous and most massive in general are outside our Galaxy, they can be found in the Magellanic clouds, and therefore are not included in our catalogue.
I don't want to take this off-topic, so please no questions like that in this thread (at least I won't answer them here).
Thanks about the catalog I take it I can download it from the Library but I should turn off procedural stars even if I have 32 GB of RAM and run it at 720?  I am going to try and make a video like what you made, I think you did a fantastic job, and thank you for it.
 
A-L-E-X
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Publications about SE

06 Apr 2021 08:26

Wow, nice work, and congratulations with a new discovery!
I am still far from implementing of a whole GAIA catalog support. Athough I think that SE will not use all 2 billion stars, because it can render only stars with a good parallax, luminocity and color data. What I need to implement (aside from a new dynamic octree which will support data streaming from the disk), is a conversion of color + luminosity into stellar class.
I remember you were excited about eventually including a mini H-R diagram with stars in the FOV represented as dots on the graph and mousing over them (or the point on the graph) which would quickly and efficiently show which was which, great idea.  We could do that with the Gaia data also.

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