Browse galaxies discovered by SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) using WebGL. Let the size of the universe blow your mind :-)
The data is currently not checked into the repo as it is ~80 megabytes. Download the data from CASJobs using something like the following query:
SELECT p.objid, p.ra, p.dec, s.z as redshift
FROM PhotoObj AS p
JOIN SpecObj AS s ON s.bestobjid = p.objid
WHERE s.class='galaxy'
ORDER BY p.objid;
This gives you a raw dump of galactic coordinates (ascension, declination and red shift). Then use the script provided in scripts/spherical_rectangular.py
to transform this data into a database than can be used by the webserver.
The actual browser needs to be compiled using Webpack. See webpack.config.js
.
The front end code mainly depends on Babel (ES6), Lodash, jQuery and of course three.js
. Look at package.json
for more details.
This is just a proof of concept. I have many ideas to actually host this demo online. If you want to collaborate on this, don't hesitate to contact me.