Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium

3.2. MILKY WAY ATLAS TUTORIAL 27
3.2 Milky Way Atlas Tutorial
The Milky Way tutorial is designed to introduce you to the Milky Way in segments that lend themselves
to the scale and structure of our Galaxy. Each tutorial covers the science, the data, and Partiview’s user
interface and selected commands. Complete information on each data group can be found in “Milky
Way Data Groups.”
Each tutorial will tell you what to turn on before starting and what data groups and commands you
will use in the tutorial. Let’s start with the view from Earth.
3.2.1 The View from Earth
We begin with what may be familiar: the night sky. Each tutorial in this section focuses on how to view
the Atlas from one place, Earth. In reality, the Earth-Sun distance is negligibly small in the parsec-scaled
Milky Way Atlas (the Earth-Sun distance is about 93 million miles, or 0.00000485 parsecs), so the Earth
and Sun are synonymous with one another when we discuss their position in the Atlas.
Of course, there is no daytime sky in the Digital Universe—Partiview is not a planetarium simulator.
Partiview cannot show you when stars rise and set or where the planets are. Rather, its strength lies in
giving context to the objects that make up our Galaxy, tapping into its data visualization roots.
Now, let’s begin by launching the Digital Universe’s Milky Way Atlas.
Tutorial: Learning to Fly
Goals: To learn basic functions and review navigation.
Before starting, turn on: stars, mwVis
You will be using: no additional groups
Your Initial Location When you launch the Milky Way Atlas, the preset position has you looking
toward the constellation Orion, with the stars Sirius and Procyon in the foreground. The size of their
labels is proportional to their distance from you, so you can gauge the distance of objects based on their
label size. But from where are you viewing these stars?