Slice of 100,000,000-star tour


star100m data


The point set for star100m consists of locations of the nearest 100,000,000 stars in the Gaia DR2 instance of the TSP. Like the 10,000,000-star example, this subset of Gaia DR2 has interesting internal structure, with dense rays of stars emanating from the center of the distribution.

The TSPLIB file containing the xyz triples gobbles up 4.5 GB of disk space. If you would like to have access to the data, please send an email to bico@uwaterloo.ca and I'll place it temporarily on the web site.

Computing Distances

To create an instance of the TSP, we need to specify precisely the point-to-point distances we use. For this, we adopt the standard TSPLIB norm for 3D Euclidean data. This norm takes the straight-line distance between two points and rounds the resulting value to the nearest integer. In our case, the star-to-star distance is therefore measured to the nearest 1/10th parsec. Here is a simplified version of the computer code used in Concorde for the distance calculation.

Snapshots

Star 100m points full view
Star 100m points zoom 1
Star 100m points zoom 2

Notes

The point set is rendered with the three.js JavaScript 3D library.