This is beautiful and terrifying. Thank you for sharing.
fercircularbuf•Aug 21, 2026
Wow, this is humbling
sambapa•Aug 21, 2026
In what ways? Galaxies are just fat fucks, they don't do no philosophy, play piano or shitpost.
Towaway69•Aug 21, 2026
If you squint, look at just the right portion, at just the right zoom level, the stars line up and spell out "thanks for all the fish".
sambapa•Aug 21, 2026
Hm, that's a good thing to consider - are there portions of the sky in which stars align into a coherent text?
Towaway69•Aug 21, 2026
Just gotta join the dots! ;)
Or better still, develop a traveling salesman solution for visiting each star just once.
> Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was a being who became immortal after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator. After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order. [1]
I think the odds of a character are very high, the odds of a short word are very high, the odds of a meaningful sentence are quite low, and the odds of anything more than that vanishingly small. It probably also depends on whether you're ok with viewing your assembly from an arbitrary position or if it must be from earth.
cwmoore•Aug 21, 2026
Not this data, but from nearby 3D star map with rotations:
That's impressive. Though I think there's too much space on this plane. I'm wondering whether it is actually a 2D view since it obviously isn't planar.
To paraphrase Samuel L Jackson - "I have had it with this m'f'ing space on a plane! Everybody strap in I'm about to open some f'in' windows."
Proceeds to crank open an array of telescopes to get another 3D perspective of a 4D universe so we can project it onto our 2D viewing devices as if that were reality.
zuzululu•Aug 21, 2026
why is there so many weird flat lines is that an artifact?
this is fascinating wish there was a 360 VR version of this
truly immense scale
dylan604•Aug 21, 2026
back when I was playing with making VR content, this is one of the first things I did by using an 8K rectilinear image from NASA. Mapped it to a sphere and lined up Polaris at the zenith, and then just had one of the best nights of stargazing I had ever had!
Towaway69•Aug 21, 2026
I wonder how many of the red points/stars are black hole stars[1]
17 Comments
but check out https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/#PGC3097688 and https://datalab.noirlab.edu/data/legacy-surveys
Or better still, develop a traveling salesman solution for visiting each star just once.
> Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was a being who became immortal after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator. After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order. [1]
So that wouldn't be just an academic exercise!
[1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger
https://www.ouruboroi.com/moire3
To paraphrase Samuel L Jackson - "I have had it with this m'f'ing space on a plane! Everybody strap in I'm about to open some f'in' windows."
Proceeds to crank open an array of telescopes to get another 3D perspective of a 4D universe so we can project it onto our 2D viewing devices as if that were reality.
this is fascinating wish there was a 360 VR version of this
truly immense scale
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-typ...
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/a-logarithmic-map-of-...
[1] https://ubu.com/sound/ligeti.html
https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=80.3728&dec=-69.4497&lay...
/jk
It's going to do the best surveys EVER, like exponentially better
* https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14942/
I thought for sure DOGE was going to kill it, or even rename it after him instead
But the smallest planet Roman will be able to see would be Jupiter sized
There was however going to be another telescope scheduled to launch in 2040 that could find earth-like worlds
Fittingly enough it is called the "Habitable Worlds Telescope"
but you know what, DOGE got that one
Congress allocated $150 Million to begin development this year
Somehow the executive branch pocketed that and changed it to $5 Million instead despite having no right to do that
Yet another crime against science by this administration
Hoping new Congress in January 2027 can fix this but I doubt it as too much of the rest of the country is "on fire" that has to be put out first
So now won't be able to see its results in my lifetime