Celestia Forums

The Milky way galaxy is missing a few arms, and the bar is too big.
go to http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/messier/Pic ... barsun.jpg
for what scientists think it looks like.

kj,

That picture shows a highly idealized artist's impression.

The structure seems to be turning out to be much more irregular than that. The arms are crooked and thee seem to be many disconnected lumps.

You might want to take a look at http://galaxymap.org/
Its author is in the process of creating a map from published data. It's much more difficult than you might expect.

kjknohw wrote:The Milky way galaxy is missing a few arms, and the bar is too big.
go to http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/messier/Pic ... barsun.jpg
for what scientists think it looks like.

I am a scientist and I think our milky way is certainly more realistic than what you quote. We have incorporated all major published scientific results.

Bye Fridger

Celestia's milky way looks a LOT like http://www.adg.us/images/A%20Barred%20S ... (1920x1200).jpg

nice job in creating it!

kjknohw wrote:Celestia's milky way looks a LOT like
http://www.adg.us/images/A%20Barred%20S ... (1920x1200).jpg


nice job in creating it!

Oh, what version of Celestia are you using?? You should
ALWAYS state your version and OS. Indeed, the earlier
templates for the Milkyway were a standard SBb Hubble
class that I abstracted from that Hubble photo of NGC1300 in
Eridanus. It is often designated as SBbc Hubble type (Like our Milky
Way).

Meanwhile, in the CVS version that most active forum
people use, I have implemented custom templates. For the
forthcoming 1.5.0 version we now have the custom MilkyWay image
below included that I was actually referring to above. It implements
ALL published scientific information obout the MilkyWay morphology.


Artistic views like what you were citing above, we usually do
not take seriously even though they might appear on NASA WEB
pages for PR reasons...