Flying through the nearby stars

Astronomer Richard Smart led a team a few years back to create the Gaia Catalog of Nearby Stars , a carefully analyzed star sample within 100 parsecs (325 light-years).

He encouraged me to develop a 3D application to explore the catalog.

We kept adding more and more features to the resulting Fly web application and it ended up doing things that I originally did not think that a web app could handle thanks to the incredible features of three.js.

You can fly around by dragging your mouse or finger, double click with your mouse to recentre the application and identify a star, and search for stars by entering an id in the search box at the upper right.

Behind the three line menu at the upper left there are many other features

Behind the three line menu at the upper left there are many other features including displaying meshes to identify clusters and other density structures and selecting a large number of interesting star groups.

There is even a scripting system (pdf) to create animations.

I think of Fly as an interesting toy that can give you a lot of insights into the nearby stars and I hope that it will inspire gamers, science fiction writers and even scientists.