The images below were created with the three.js JavaScript 3D library, running on an iMac Pro with a 16GB graphics card. The 16GB of memory allows us to store all 1.33 billion points, using 12 bytes per star to represent the three coordinates as single-precision floating-point numbers.
I'd really like for everyone to be able take the big tour for a spin in an interactive session, but downloading the data set would put a great strain on the web server (and most available graphics cards are not equipped with 16GB or more memory). For now, the best we can offer below are a number of screen shots and animated gifs; we also have, on the video page, several screen captures of interactive sessions. And if you'd like to take control yourself, please hop over to the 10,000,000-star tour to zoom, pan, pinch, and swipe a sample of Gaia DR2.
This is a full view of the tour. The color hue of each edge indicates its position.
A rotated view of the tour.
View moving out from Earth.
Further out from Earth, looking through the outer portion of the tour.
View of the tour passing through stars on the edge of the distribution.
A more detailed view of the outer rim.
Close-up view of a tour segment, wandering through space.
Monochromatic image of the tour's 1.33 billion edges.
Image of a long segment of the tour. Click here to see more segment images.
Rotating full view of the tour. Click here a higher resolution version.
Starting with a full view, fly through the center of the tour. Click here a higher resolution version.
The tour growing in 178-million-edge segments.
Short videos displaying the tour are given on the video page.
We thank Michael Boyle for suggesting the use of color hue to indicate the order stars appear in our solution.
