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 Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

(10.5 and above),

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partne ...

, and

IRIX IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system a ...

. It is a standalone 4-dimensional space visualization application built on the programmable Partiview data visualization engine designed by Stuart Levy of the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...

(NCSA) as an adjunct of the NCSA's Virtual Director virtual choreography project. The Virtual Universe Atlas project was launched by the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 int ...

Hayden Planetarium The Rose Center for Earth and Space is a part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Center's complete name is The Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. The main entrance is located on the no ...

with significant programming support from the

National Aeronautics and Space Administration The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding ...

as well as Stuart Levy. The database draws on the

National Virtual Observatory The US ''National Virtual Observatory-NVO- (nowadays VAO - Virtual Astronomical Observatory) was conceived to allow scientists to access data from multiple astronomical observatories, including ground and space-based facilities, through a single ...

. Along with

Celestia Celestia is a real-time 3D astronomy software program that was created in 2001 by Chris Laurel. The program allows users to virtually travel through our universe and explore real objects that have been catalogued. Celestia also doubles as a pl ...

and

Orbiter A spacecraft is a vehicle or machine designed to spaceflight, fly in outer space. A type of artificial satellite, spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including Telecommunications, communications, Earth observation satellite, Earth ...

, and unlike most other planetarium applications, Digital Universe shares the capacity to visualize space from points outside Earth. Building on work by Japan's RIKEN, its planet renderings and zoom visualizations can match or exceed Celestia and Orbiter. Unlike Celestia and Orbiter, highly accurate visualization from distances beyond the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our 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. ...

galaxy is integral to the software and the datasets. This allows for unrivaled flexibility in plotting itineraries that reveal true distances and configurations of objects in the observable sky. It therefore improves understanding of the surroundings of the solar system in terms of observer-neutral

celestial coordinate system Astronomical coordinate systems are organized arrangements for specifying positions of satellites, planets, stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects relative to physical reference points available to a situated observer (e.g. the true hor ...

s—systems that are neither

geocentric In astronomy, the geocentric model (also known as geocentrism, often exemplified specifically by the Ptolemaic system) is a superseded description of the Universe with Earth at the center. Under most geocentric models, the Sun, Moon, stars, an ...

nor

heliocentric Heliocentrism (also known as the Heliocentric model) is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the center of the universe. Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth ...

—such as the

galactic coordinate system The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system in spherical coordinates, with the Sun as its center, the primary direction aligned with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the fundamental plane parallel to an a ...

and

supergalactic coordinate system In the 1950s the astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs recognized the existence of a flattened “local supercluster” from the Shapley-Ames Catalog in the environment of the Milky Way. He noticed that when one plots nearby galaxies in 3D, they lie ...

. The Digital Universe Atlas has spun off a commercial-grade planetarium platform from SCISS called

Uniview Uniview (; abbreviated as UNV), also known as Uniview Technologies, short for Zhejiang Uniview Technologies Co., Ltd., is a Chinese video surveillance manufacturer founded in 2005, with headquarters in Hangzhou. It was founded by Huawei and 3Com a ...

that was featured in the White House star party on October 7, 2009. The Atlas database and Partiview interface is compatible with professional planetarium software such as Evans & Sutherland's

Digistar Digistar is the first computer graphics-based planetarium projection and content system. It was designed by Evans & Sutherland and released in 1983. The technology originally focused on accurate and high quality display of stars, including for the ...

and Sky-Skan's DigitalSky 2. The Digital Universe is now a critical component of the OpenSpace open source interactive data visualization software suite. In 2014, a NASA grant (supported by the NASA Science Mission Directorate in response to NASA Cooperative Agreement Number (CAN) NNH15ZDA004C, Amendment 1) was awarded to the American Museum of Natural History for the development of the OpenSpace project, to utilize the latest data visualization techniques and graphics card technologies for rapid data throughput. OpenSpace and its Digital Universe datasets work on all operating systems and is available for free download.

References

External links

Official Website

OpenSpace website

Partiview

Partiview user's guide

Partiview mailing list

* ttp://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/partiview/planets.html Selden Ball, "Planets for Partiview"
Partiview on GeoWalls

* ttps://www.zeiss.com/planetariums/int/products/products/uniview.html Uniview
Evans & Sutherland Digistar

Sky-Skan DigitalSky

"The Known Universe" video simulation, American Museum of Natural History, December 15, 2009, using the DUA database and visualized using UniView

Brian Abbott, Carter Emmart, and Ryan Wyatt, "Virtual Universe," ''Natural History'', April 2004

"3-D Tour Puts Stars within Reach," ''Wired Magazine'', June 3, 2003

Slashdot discussion, July 25, 2002

TED 2010 - A 3D atlas of the universe - Carter Emmart
{{FOSS AmigaOS 4 software Astronomy software Free astronomy software Planetarium software for Linux Science software for macOS Science software for Windows Software using the NCSA license

See also

References

External links