Thanks to the amazing powers of the internet (and super-creative developers), you can now travel through interstellar space without any fear of ending up like Sandra Bullock in Gravity. Click over to the 100,000 Stars interactive map of the galaxy, and fly through space from the safety of your own bedroom!
Built by Michael Chang and the Data Arts Team at Google, 100,000 Stars is an “interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood,” which basically means you can mess around in space and feel like you’re really there. Showing the location of 119,617 nearby stars, you can zoom right in, from the whole Milky Way, to our local star system, and solar system. Clicking on a star will give you more info about it, and there’s also a really interesting interactive tour to get you started.
Oh, and did we mention the map is set to music composed by the same guy who did the music for Mass Effect?
This awesome map is part of the Chrome Experiments project, a showcase of web experiments that anyone can submit to the Google team. They’re all built in HTML5 and JavaScript using open web technologies like Canvas and WebRTC, and they are usually really, really cool. You can read a whole complicated description of how Chang and the team built the map right here.
They do warn you that the map might not be accurate to the mile, so please, don’t use it for interstellar travel.
(via Chrome Experiments Workshop, image via lacomj)
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