Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Thursday 10 May 2018

A hydrogen infinity sphere


This one is driven more by an effort to make a pretty picture than display the data in some fancy way. The main sphere has a texture of all-sky hydrogen data, so there's nothing clever about wrapping that to a sphere. But inside the data sphere is another sphere which is purely reflective, and outside the data sphere is another reflecting sphere which is included in the raytracing but not rendered. So the effect is of a sphere with an infinite series of reflections of the data... well, OK, probably more like ten. The raytracing depth is limited and the reflectivity of the spheres isn't quite perfect, so successive reflections appear darker.

It might be fun to transition this one to a volumetric spherical display.

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