M16 and the Eagle Nebula: a 3D montage

[selden]

[url=http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/m16-v2b.jpg]
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A layering of 6 different astronomical images of M16 and the Eagle Nebula can be downloaded from http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/m16-v2.zip It's 10MB.

A detailed description can be found at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/m16-v2-readme.html

[-Shadow-]

I'll Download it on Friday, I'll have High speed internet access then.
It looks Beautiful though it doesn't resemble a rifle at all

[selden]

-shadow-,

well, download it when you can

Here's a variant with all the images opaque.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/m16-v3.zip (8.5MB)

To appreciate this one most easily, we really do need a way to turn Nebula textures off and on easily. However, you can edit the .DSC file to turn off (comment out) the Mesh declarations of the pictures you don't want to see. The way they're arranged, disabling "eagle" and "phot-37a-01" lets you see the important parts of the other 4.


(As usual, these thumbnails link to much larger images)

The one on the left has all images enabled. It shows the ESA/ISO "eagle" image of cold gases in front of the NOAO false-color picture of the nebula.

The one on the right has "eagle" and "phot" disabled. This reveals the high-resolution ESO infra-red picture of the tip of pillar #1 over the NASA "Pillars of Creation" with the 2MASS mosaic atlas in the background.

[selden]

Oops.


I neglected to mention that Grant Hutchison provided a spreadsheet which helped a lot in getting all the pictures properly aligned. I've updated the readme files to acknowledge this.

Grant's spreadsheet, which calculates appropriate Axis and Angle values for an object at a specific RA and Dec, can be found at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/dsc-spreadsheet.html

[-Shadow-]

D/Ling right now should be done in several min since I'm using a High-speed connection
1 thing though, Please DON'T call me -Shadow-, It's just Shadow. The Forum wouldn't allow me to use that for some reason
Shadow is my nickname for everything. I told Fridger the same when He called me -Shadow-, so just Shadow, sounds better than "Hyphen Shadow Hyphen"

- Shadow

[selden]

Shadow,

OK, I'll remember that.

It wouldn't let you use the username "Shadow" because there already is someone else with that nick on the forum who isn't you.

[-Shadow-]

I know, It said the username is already in use.
I know what I'm doing on a forum after several days since I posted everyday for over an hour and Armada Universe, i got used to that YaBB in 1 week it was the second forum i ever went to, I got used to phpBB2 in several hours.Impossible... The Forum had to let me register as Shadow,
I registered As -Shadow April 18th, Shadow registered May 13th, Odd.
- Shadow

[selden]

I've updated the two zip files to contain somewhat more accurate star positions. They're now less than 0.1 arc second from where they should be instead of being off by about 1.0 arc second. I found a more accurate precession routine than the one I had been using.

The updated .STC file can be downloaded by itself from http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/m16-cluster.stc

There's no reason to download the updated STC file unless you're really picky about things. You can only see the difference if you turn Celestia's magnification up all the way (FOV of 3 arc seconds) and look really closely.