Celestia Forums

Here's v5 of my Addon which shows positions of the 2617 pulsars in ATNF's current catalog, v1.56. The previously published version of the Addon (v2, December, 2004) showed the positions of the 1509 pulsars in v1.2 of their catalog.

I was surprised to see that there seems to be an indication of a galactic arm which wasn't present in their earlier catalog. I haven't investigated to determine how much of it is due to revised pulsar positions and how much is due to the additional pulsars in their updated database.

Flipping between the galaxy view and the pulsar data, you can see where the two agree, and where they diverge. Both the Sagittarius arm and the Perseus arm are a bit closer to us on the pulsar map than on the galaxy map, and there appears to be a whole new arm at around 6 o'clock. Very interesting.

Selden, thanks for sharing!

I edited the Milky Way.png file manually.

This is the result:



This is the edited Milky Way.png file:



If someone has more time it would be fantastic to see a more accurate new Milky Way.png file...

Added after 29 minutes 34 seconds:
I changed the two attached files...these are v.3...

Version 4.0.

I merged my manually created png file with the original Milky Way.png...



This the new Milky Way.png...



Added after 2 hours 19 minutes:
Version 5.0.

I found this Milky Way map, it is supposed to be the most accurate.



Now, I merged all three Milky Way maps into one...



And this is the Milky Way.png file:

Hm... I found a version of the Milky Way map without a grid: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10748 and managed to process it into a texture without repainting:



Maybe not optimized for Celestia, but I wonder if that could mean Celestia's galaxy modeling is not optimized . Anyways, this texture might be totally wrong in scale and maybe rotated by 180°, I didn't check. If this method works, we could produce better models of galaxies in Celestia

Thanks! I'm using layers and alpha channels to merge and edit the Milky Way.png. I suspect that the current "official" version is not accurate, it would be nice to have a correct one.

Yes, it might not be that accurate. There are some shematic views that might be better, but we will have to wait for gaia data to get an accurate structure. Well at least this method could work for other galaxies.

Version 6.0.

Celestia screen:



Milky Way.png:

Version 7.0 (final)



Milky Way.png

Version 8.0 (final-final version )

OK, I will stop. This is really the last time.

I used three images as source:







This is the merged result in Celestia:



This is the new Milky Way.png file: