100,000 stars • Hacker News Board

Re: 100,000 stars

#51

Post by rogerbinns » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 9:58 PM UTC

Here is a great Youtube video showing the sizes of objects starting with the moon and working its way up to the largest known star. (Our Sun is a rounding error at that point!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q - if youtube refuses to play because of audio try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek

Here is another one showing an animation of asteroids discovered in our solar system from 1980 to 2011. It starts off pretty tame, and by the end gets scary! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE

Re: 100,000 stars

#52

Post by ajross » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 10:18 PM UTC

Amusingly for a "Chrome Experiment" it refuses to run on my chrome (Chrome 23 on Fedora 17 with Ivy Bridge graphics).

Firefox on the same machine works flawlessly.

Re: 100,000 stars

#53

Post by malbs » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 10:46 PM UTC

Nothing interesting to add except it was an enjoyable way to start the day, thanks. Always good to have something remind you how insignificant you are! The music was great too

edit: loaded it in chrome instead, even better (should have been obvious given it's located on chromeexperiments.com)

Re: 100,000 stars

#54

Post by narag » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:12 PM UTC

epsylon wrote: post #48

Absolutely amazing. By the way, it also works on Firefox. (Though performance isn't... stellar )

FF 16.0.2 on Windows 7 64 here... it works smoothly, but that's no surprise, this machine is very powerful.

The page is so beautiful! Until now I've never felt the need to say this: wish I could upvote it more :-)

Re: 100,000 stars

#55

Post by xvolter » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:12 PM UTC

This is amazing. Now to figure out how to make this my desktop background...

Re: 100,000 stars

#56

Post by scott_s » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:17 PM UTC

equalarrow wrote: post #20

WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are. I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind b…

Obligatory buzz-kill, Charles Stross on why we're unlikely to leave the solar system: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

Re: 100,000 stars

#57

Post by Domenic_S » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:19 PM UTC

ynniv wrote: post #27

duaneb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swiping up to move closer feels natural to me. Perhaps it is the other platforms that are wrong?

It would take a proper user interaction study to find out, but I don't think that I am wrong. Imagine a photograph on a table that you want to see better (make larger). Your natural motion is to touch and pull, which is dragging down.

Hold control on your MBP and scroll up. It zooms in.

command and '+' zooms text.

Scrolling down generally scrolls to the end of a page. Scrolling down here scrolls to the end of the galaxy.

Hold out your hand and make the "unpinch" gesture, which enlarges photos in iOS and Android. Which direction do your scrolling fingers move?

Re: 100,000 stars

#58

Post by pardner » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:25 PM UTC

It's a small world after all.

Re: 100,000 stars

#59

Post by ronyeh » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:26 PM UTC

Beautiful. Someone needs to make a turn-based strategy game out of this visualization.

Re: 100,000 stars

#60

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Nov 14, 2012, 11:32 PM UTC

I love the way they made the stars - from close a sun actually looks like a pile of hot, glowing, boiling gas, and not like cold orange sphere you can see pretty much everywhere else.