Magnetic field of the Milky Way

[Cham]

While working on some realistic magnetic fields of pulsars, I'm thinking about creating a representation of the Milky Way global magnetic field. I need more info on the field configuration, and I also need some idea about how to create a CMOD file which could represents arrows, like on the picture of this web page :

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~reid/bfield.html

I don't want to create a 3ds model for the arrows. I want SCALE INDEPENDANT lines. A true CMOD model.

[selden]

Cham,

I find your description of what you want rather confusing, so I'm not sure what you're asking for.

It should be easy enough to create a model of a single canonical arrow and then create a DSC catalog file which places that model in many locations with arbitrary sizes and orientations. In other words, the declarations in the DSC file are what would define the vector field.

[Cham]

Defining an arrow for hundreds (if not thousands) of locations, in a DSC file, would be extremelly tedious. I'm thinking about a global model (only one CMOD file) with all the arrows defined in it. I was also thinking about building this model using a math program (like Mathematica or Maple) to define the field, and then convert the data to a CMOD file, like what I'm doing with magnetic field lines. But actually, I'm not sure I'll be able to do it. Maybe I'm a bit too ambitious here.

[selden]

The values that are needed for the DSC file are essentially the same values that are needed to place the arrows in a CMOD model. Both would be text files, although with a different format. Of course, a single model describing all of the arrows would be drawn *much* faster than a single DSC file placing them one at a time.