The Milky Way

[gradius_fanatic]

Do you think we may one day hav data on ALL stars in this galaxy of ours? If we did, it's be awesome to hav them ALL rendered on Celestia, don't you think?

[Malenfant]

We won't have data on all the stars in the milky way for starters simply because we can't see them all from Earth. Heck, we don't even know where every star within 25pc of us is, and you want the whole galaxy?!

(BTW, this is entirely irrelevant to Celestia's Development. Please post this sort of thing in Purgatory instead)

[t00fri]

Do you think we may one day hav data on ALL stars in this galaxy of ours? If we did, it's be awesome to hav them ALL rendered on Celestia, don't you think?

It's always a good idea to use ones common sense a bit before seriously making such completely unrealistic proposals ...As Malenfant correctly states, there are NO scientific data available for star coordinates in ANY galaxy except the Milky Way. Here, however we only have at best access to stars from a small visible /part/ of it...

See also my answer to your even more unrealistic proposition in the user's board:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8373

Bye Fridger

[gradius_fanatic]

Geez...ease up people, it's jus a little dreamer's question, no reason to get all worked up about it.

[buggs_moran]

Geez...ease up people, it's jus a little dreamer's question, no reason to get all worked up about it.

Don't take it too hard. You are young and curious, that's good. However, you should search the forum and the web for answers as much as possible before posing a question. The Hipparcos mission (named after the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, father of stellar magnitudes) by the ESA was an effort to catalog hundreds of thousands of stars in our local region of the galaxy. Through the ESA's efforts and an extension of the mission called Tycho (named after Tycho Brahe, a very interesting man indeed, look him up) the final catalog reached 2.5 million stars. Considering that the estimate for stars in our galaxy is somewhere between 100-200 billion *from what I have read), we have a way to go. There is new work on new projects to map 1 billion stars. Still that is only 1/200th of the total in our galaxy alone. Mind boggling, isn't it?

[gradius_fanatic]

yeah.....with those statistics, it kind of makes you feel ALMOST non-existant

[scaddenp]

Hmm, so if you could compress the data for each star to say 28 bytes
(fat hope - but thats 3 doubles and an integer id), you need then
a mere 6 TB file for your star catalogue. I hope I see computer that
can handle it in my life time even if there is no chance of a star catalogue
getting close to that.

[gradius_fanatic]

Now that would be awesome! Who knows, with the way tecnology's going, we may very soon have acess to computers of that power. But for now, all those government type folks are probably hoggin em'. U know how they don't want the people to know crud.

[scaddenp]

[quote="gradius_fanatic"] But for now, all those government type folks are probably hoggin em'. U know how they don't want the people to know crud.[/quote]

Umm, I work for research company that 100% government owned. And
yes, we are very close to shipping around 1TB of data - but that from
to/from oil companies and the data is 3D seismic. A stack of massive USB platters. However, for an ordinary desktop to usefully use 6TB data the
same way we use a star catalogue for rendering is another story altogether.
You video card if its very good will hold 1GB of memory at moment. When
will it hold say 100GB of video memory? Hmm.

[gradius_fanatic]

oh.....I'm sorry if I offended you in any way.....what I said earlier, well.....rumors like that have senselessly spread around. It's to the point that there's no way of knowing who is really speaking the truth, and not just wanting attention.

[Unfound]

I'm probably going to make myself another high-profile enemy .

Toofri, while I do agree that the question was a wee bit absurd (of course we could, given enough time, map and render the whole galaxy, it's wrather like the monkeys and their typewriters with Shakespear), you seem to have........how do you say...........tried to reduce him to a 5 year old. He honestly wondered. Shouldn't you and I both just thank whatever powers that be for the continueing existance of such people? I know that if but a 16th of the information on this board (or Celestia itself, for that matter) were posed to the average member of my community, they would freeze like a deer trapped in the headlights, then their eyes would glaze for a few seconds, then they would shrug their shoulders at you (and through you the local complementary "now-isn't-he-a-strange-one" look) and mumble something semi-unintelligable that, translated roughly from Olde Hick, means "uhahuh" (English=I do not know). They would then walk off and avoid you like the plauge for several days. Thus, on the whole, I really do think you were a wee bit too hard on him.

Be that as it may, back to the matter at hand: in an elaboration of my above answer (the one involving monkeys, not deer ), I do not believe we shall see the Milky Way mapped in totality within our, our childrens', or our grand childrens' lifetimes. In my opinion, the primary reason for this would be cosmological factors: a star shrouded by an uber-thick nebula, a companion star so tiny it is swallowed up in the glare of its' counterpart, etc. There's just simply too many stars present to expect a single sweep to detect every one. multiple sweeps, I feel, would be necessary. That of course, takes time.