Astronomy Visualizations On this web page you will find some of my astronomy visualizations. I specialize in taking research computer simulations and creating animations using high-end visualization tools. Some of the visualizations here are polished, some are just tests, but all attempt to present accurate science in a visually understandable way.

A black hole visits Baltimore's Inner Harbor

Globular Star Cluster Exploration -- This scientific visualization portrays the activities within a small globular star cluster over a period of about three hundred thousand years. June 2005, posted October 2006

Big Hubble Images -- A convenient listing of the largest Hubble press release images. All are TIFF images using lossless compression, and are the highest quality available. July 2006

IMAX Short Film - Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time -- A three minute large format film exploring the diversity, distribution, and evolution of galaxies in the universe June 2004

Visualization Wall Project at Space Telescope -- A 21 million pixel display driven by a beowulf cluster that is used for high resolution astronomy, scientific visualization, and high performance computing [yes, it is in my office] June 2004

Cosmic Cruising 2 -- A visualization of the "cosmic web" - the large scale structure of the universe April 2003

A Black Hole Visits Baltimore -- A visualization of a black hole passing over Baltimore's Inner Harbor June 2003, updated April 2004

Galaxy Collision -- A movie of two spiral galaxies colliding NOTE: An old version is available here and a still older version is here November 2001, updated April 2002

Evolution of a Globular Star Cluster -- A movie showing approximately a quarter of a million years in the life of a dense star cluster. May 2000, updated April 2002

Stellar Collisions and Cosmic Catstrophes -- I organized two presentations of ten exceptional scientific visualizations for this conference in May 2000. May 2000

StarSplatter Star Field Visualizations -- I have used Joel Welling's StarSplatter code to do some visualizations of star fields. Included on this page is: Globular Cluster Visualizations using StarSplatter February 1999, updated December 1999

IMAX Film "Cosmic Voyage" -- Some web pages describing my involvement in the IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage" 1996

Some Other Visualization Stuff

• Fisheye Lens Shader -- A renderman shader that raytraces a fisheye lens from the camera -- December 2001, updated March 2002, updated April 2004

• Princeton Montage -- A montage of images that shows various astronomical objects at their correct relative sizes as seen from Earth -- May 2002

• Gravitational Lensing -- A black hole creates a gravitational lens in front of the Matterhorn -- April 2002

• Cosmic Web -- Some images from the data set behind the sequence in the IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage" and some other large scale structure images -- 1996, updated 1999

• Datasets -- Some astronomy datasets useful for visualization -- 1999

Last modified: October 25, 2004