Folks,

For HST's 18th anniversary today, we released 59 images
of galaxy interactions. It is a great collection of images
and worth checking out.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/

As a visualization to accompany the images, I took
a galaxy collsion simulation and matched it to five
of the images. I run the simulation, pause it, rotate
to match the observed geometry, and cross-fade to
the observations. I think the effect is really cool, but
my opinion is obviously biased.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/video/d/

I wanted to note to this list a nifty piece of software
that enabled this viz. I used the S2PLOT libraries from
the folks at Swinburne to quickly write a custom
application for viewing the simulation data in 3D. In
just one afternoon, I Iearned enough of S2PLOT to create
a basic app that can view the data as points, rotate
in 3D, and output the camera coordinates and orientation
to the screen. Since my render code is in C, having C libraries
for pre-viz was a perfect fit. This quick app made finding
the correct camera position for matching simulation to
observation much easier.

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/s2plot/

A public thanks to the Swinburne folks for their software.


Frank

Space Telescope Science Institute 410-338-4749
3700 San Martin Dr 410-338-4579 (fax)
Baltimore, MD 21218 summers@...
http://terpsichore.stsci.edu/~summers/