Built by Michael Chang and the Data Arts Team at Google, 100,000 Stars interactive map of the galaxy is an “interactive visualization of the stellar neighbourhood”, which is a showy way of saying “have an aul tour of space and the Milky Way, sure it’s pretty cool”. The fully interactive map shows the location of almost 120,000 stars nearby. You can zoom in and out from the outskirts of the Milky Way to our local star and solar system all the way to the sun. The developers do warn that it may not be exactly accurate to the mile, so if you’re a Time Lord, don’t use this to get yourself around.
Clicking on stars gives you more about them, and there’s also a very interesting and informative tour to get you started. The music is also composed by Sam Hulick and Jack Wall, the guys who composed the music for the Mass Effect series. In fact, the looped music is actually from the cutting room floor of the Mass Effect score.
The map is part of the Chrome Experiments project, a showcase of web experiments that anyone can submit to the Google team. They’re all built in HTML5 and JavaScript using open web technologies. If you’re a web nerd, you can read about the technologies and how they were implemented over on HTML5 Rocks, where Chang and the team give an in-depth description and analysis of how they built it.
via Geekosystem | Featured image via HDWallpapers
