The View from Earth
The View from Earth
We begin with what may be familiar: the night sky. Each tutorial in this section focuses on how to view the Atlas from one place, Earth. In reality, the Earth-Sun distance is negligibly small in the parsec-scaled Milky Way Atlas (the Earth-Sun distance is 0.00000485 parsecs), so the Earth and Sun are synonymous with one another when we discuss their position in the Atlas.
Of course, there is no daytime sky in the Digital Universe, for Partiview is not a planetarium simulator. Partiview cannot show you when stars rise and set or where the planets are. Rather, its strength lies in giving context to the objects that make up our Galaxy, tapping into its data visualization roots.
Now, let's begin by launching the Digital Universe's Milky Way Atlas.
Subsections
- Learning to Fly
- Constellations
- Coordinates in the Sky
- The Milky Way from Earth
- Two-Dimensional Distributions
© 2002-2005 American Museum of Natural History
Last Modified: 2007-12-19 by Brian Abbott