3D interactive map of nearest stars

[Ags]

For the past couple of weeks I've been working on a clickable map of the nearest stars. I try to include all stars in the Hipparchos catalog out to 80 light years - just far enough out to include Regulus and 1500 other stars. You can move from star to star by clicking the Hipparchos ID number below the star. I also indicate which stars have known planets. I am working on adding in all the nearby 2MASS and WISE infrared objects too. What do you think?

http://beyondproxima.appspot.com/

[graemlourens]

Impressive! The representation is very unique and interesting.

Intuitively i wanted to click & drag around, but quickly found out that i have to click on the stars

Good Luck with your project!

Kind regards, Graem

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Really amazing! I never realized there were so many stars relatively near by!

John

[David Levi]

Hello @Ags That's very impressive. I wouldn't even know where to start producing something that good. In my opinion, and I hope you don't mind some suggestions for the program, I would like to see an option to display the star names e.g. Procyon instead of the HIP numbers. As @graemlourens hinted, it would also be an advantage to be able to rotate the 'cube'. As I was navigating to the different stars, I got lost. This might just be lack of familiarity with the program. It took me a minute to navigate my way back to the Sun. Perhaps a 'home' button would be good and maybe some sort of compass at the edge of the 'cube' to let you know in which direction the Sun is. I hope you don't mind me suggesting these things as the work you have already done for the model is fabulous. Congratulations!

[Stub Mandrel]

Very interesting and fun to play wit :-)

Would it be possible to add a 'return to sun' button, or arrow keys to move around instead of 'star hopping'

[Ags]

Thanks for the encouraging comments. I discovered today that the diagram does not load for some desktop Chrome browsers on Windows 7. So I'm trying to fix that first.

I will add in the official IAU star names (Rigil Kentaurus, Regulus etc) and I also want to add in the commonly understood names like Barnard's Star too.

Perhaps I can add mappings to the arrow keys and Page Up / Page Down to move the cube around.

Adding a home button is very easy, as is adding an indicator in the corner of the cube that is nearest the sun.

By the way, you can already rotate the cube (there's a table of controls next to the diagram) but the rotation is instantaneous and not animated and its a bit confusing I think.

[RobertI]

Very nice app, excellent work.   works fine using Safari on my ipad but does not update the last four attributes in the table (spectral class description and below) when changing stars. Fun to use as is, but definitely worth developing further in my opinion. I just did a quick search to see if there are any nebulae, clusters, etc closer than 80 light years which could be included, but there don't seem to be any. 

[Ags]

Thanks! I have not yet added the Javascript for the last four attributes; I will try get that done over the weekend. Although we may not have any star clusters or nebulae near us,  I think the the unique and interesting objects close by are the brown dwarfs and (maybe) rogue planets, which we simply can't detect when they are further away. I have a spreadsheet of about 90 very dim objects to add to this map , mostly L, T and Y brown dwarfs, but also a few very very faint red dwarfs like Scholz's Star (which came within 1 light year of us 70,000 years ago).

I'm relieved you didn't find any nebulae - that would have been mighty hard to represent with SVG, which is a 2D graphics format 

I originally wanted to go out as far as 100 parsecs, and hopefully I will extend to cover this range, but I will have to make the Javascript a lot smarter as this would include 22,000 Hipparchos objects (and many many more when we have the Gaia data available). 100 parsecs is appealing as Hipparchos is still reasonably accurate at that distance, and it would include the nearest truly bright giant, Canopus. But even then a nearby cluster like the Pleiades would be just outside of the range.

 

[furrysocks2]

Love stuff like this - good JS-fu!

Another piece of work along the same lines - https://in-the-sky.org/ngc3d.php

 

[Ags]

Thanks. My JS-fu is weak, but StackOverflow is strong

[johnfosteruk]

This is great, glad to see you're making use of stackoverflow

 

[Ags]

I deployed a new version of http://beyondproxima.appspot.com with the following changes:

1. Label text slightly larger for small screens.

2. Shortcuts added to prominent stars (the Sun, Regulus, Aldebaran).

3. Green buttons added so you can move the view box without clicking on a star).

4. All items in the info table are now updated when a star is selected.

[JOC]

Perhaps its just me, but my first instinct was to click on the coloured dots of the stars themselves to make the display go to each star rather than click on where the star names were printed.  It's quite clever though and way beyond anything I could achieve. 

[Ags]

I keep forgetting to fix that! All it takes is moving one line of code, and the the star icons are clickable...

[Ags]

I started this morning before work on adding the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars to the site; it's less accurate that Hipparchos, but it adds a further 1500 stars to the data set (doubling the number of stars in the map). You may have noticed that as you navigate away from the Sun on my site, the stars become more sparse and brighter in absolute terms - this is because Hipparchos could only measure distances to relatively bright objects so there is a distinct bias in the data. Gliese (technically its successor, the GJ catalog) has objects down to magnitude 20 so clearly it has less bias toward the Sun.

[David Levi]

Excellent! The modifications really help to navigate around. The arrows at the box edges help to keep a rectilinear track in ones mind about where you are. At least they do for me.  I love the way that when you are far away from the Sun and you then click to go back to the Sun, all the stars in between slide by rather than just jumping to the Sun. Fantastic! Thank you for this great fun atlas.

[Ags]

I am still working on adding the Gliese catalog to the map, but this is taking some time as there is some difficulty correlating the two data sets. Gliese parallaxes are often too approximate to use for correlation, and correlating by RA, DEC and vmag is compromised by the time differences between the catalogs and the high proper motion of most of the objects. I have discovered that using galactic coordinates makes the correlation somewhat easier so I think I will switch the diagram to use galactic coordinates.

In the mean time I found another neat catalog to add in:

MDWARFASC - Bright M Dwarf All-Sky Catalog

http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/star-catalog/mdwarfasc.html

This catalog adds many faint dwarfs missing from both HIP and Gliese (Gliese includes faint targets, but does not include faint objects with small proper motions). It is also very inaccurate in terms of measured distance; I am thinking of adding error bars to the diagram to indicate the stars for which distance is highly uncertain. For example, Regulus is in the HIP version of the map, but is not in the Gliese version; it is on the very edge of the map and due to uncertainties was not included in the Gliese catalog.

[Ags]

I've updated the star map with Gliese catalog stars and added in official IAU star names, which include names like Ran and Tatawin (Tatooine?) which I've never heard of before. I also added in TRAPPIST-1, because it's been in the news. With these updates the map includes 4300 stars, up from 1500 previously.

http://beyondproxima.appspot.com/

[David Levi]

It's amazing how few stars within approx 71 light years of the Sun have names. Very informative and gives great perspective on what's close to us.

[Ags]

And a significant number of the names like Titawin come from an IAU Boaty McBoatface competition by the IAU. I'd be happier if the IAU only recognized names that come into widespread use, rather than actively creating names itself. For example, Barnard's Star should be recognized as a name because the name is in widespread use and is perfectly understood.

Nobody needs "Titawin". Upsilon Andromedae is a better name in this case, you immediately know it is relatively faint and where it is in the sky. 

[Ags]

I added the nearest brown dwarfs to the Sun today, represented by "snowflake" icons 

[David Levi]

Hello @Ags It's a terrific map. I was wondering while I was wandering around - In which direction is the galactic centre? and Where is the plane of the Milkyway? I hope this is not a daft question by reason that these indicators are already there and I've missed them. Nice choice of symbol by the way for the brown dwarfs.

[Ags]

I have been thinking of putting in a background showing the milky way but currently there is no indication.

[Ags]

Some more incremental progress... @JOC I finally made the stars themselves clickable, not just the labels. Also I made the green clickable arrows move the box in increments of 10% of current width not just 5% of current width.

I also had a brainwave for how to handle much larger sets of stars, so I can go out to 100 parsecs as I originally wished and include my favorite star, Canopus. It would also include at least two star clusters, the Hyades and the Coma Star Cluster (never seen that one, but it's 90 parsecs away). I'll probably work on that data expansion to 23,000 HIP entries next month.

I'm also doing some work on visualising the orbits of exoplanets, as a pop-up overlay for this map.

[JOC]

Hi Ags - great news - it just seemed to me entirely instinctive to want to click on the star circles themselves!  LOL  Mind you I couldn't even consider doing anything like this (which is why I was not really qualified to offer any opinion let alone what I saw as a possible improvement! ) so 'hats off' to whatever you manage to develop.