Gazing up at Earth's star-studded night sky has been a hallowed human tradition for thousands of years. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has built on our natural inclination to marvel at these stellar beacons with a new interactive tool called Star Mapper.The project digitally reconstructs the positions and movements of nearly 60,000 individual stars across the northern and southern hemispheres, allowing users to intuitively explore the night sky through a panoramic, three-dimensional visualization.
In addition to casually sidling up to different areas of our local cosmic neighborhood, Star Mapper lets users view stars through different astronomical lenses. The data can be organized by apparent magnitude, which reflects the luminosity of stars from our perspective on Earth, or by their absolute magnitude, a standardized measurement that expresses the intrinsic brightness of a star.
The dataset, which is based on the immense star catalogue generated by ESA's Hipparcos satellite, can also be arranged to show the motions of the stars over a timescale stretching millions of years into either the past or future. Modeling them as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, which is used to plot the evolution of stars, is another feature on the site.
You can take ESA's Star Mapper out for a spin here, though be warned: The tool can be a bit of a timesuck. After all, it's pretty much an online riff on astral projection, so it's easy to get lost in virtual space.Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.
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