Did you see the article in December's _Sky_&_Telescope_ entitled "Akira Inaka's
3-D Universe"?
You know those "Magic Eye" books where you stare wall-eyed at pictures to get a
3-D effect? Some people can do them and some can't. My dad and I have no
trouble; my sister and my son can't, no matter how hard they try. When those
pictures click for me, there's a freaky brain-shift, like I lost my balance for
a second, then WOW I'm swimming around in a little page-sized dimensional
world.
Well, the article in S&T uses stereo pairs, which are similar to Magic Eye.
This fellow in Japan, he put two copies of an image of Scorpius side-by-side in
Photoshop. To create the stereo pair, he looked up the distance from earth of
each star appearing in the image (at least, each star having a known distance),
and using his mouse he laboriously shifted each star's image by the correct
tiny amount proportional to its distance.
The result is that you can look at Scorpius in 3-D. It just floats off the
page. The "claw" stars Beta, Delta, and Pi are pretty far back there, while
Antares comes toward us a bit, but EPS pokes way up into to foreground, right
in front of your nose, and ETA sticks up toward you pretty far, too.
The article also has stereo pairs of Orion, the Rosette, the LMC, Hodge 301,
and my favorite, Subaru. I was blown away seeing Subaru in 3-D. Of course I
always *knew* that those stars exist out there, strewn across the firmament at
various distances, I just had to *imagine* it before, whereas the stereo pairs
make it appear real.
This gentleman's web site is
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~aq6a-ink/indexusa.htm
wherein you can reportedly see all the constellations, and Andromeda, and Omega
Centauri, and more. I'm a new fan of his.
But hasn't someone already thought of this? Isn't there some planetarium
software capable of generating stereo pairs for various parts of the sky, based
on known star distances, or at least on nice-looking arbitrary distance
assignments?
-- From Dan
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