The Astronomy Nexus

The Basic Chart form for 3D Universe currently has two sizes of charts, for people with different monitor sizes. The small charts are 280x210 pixels, and can be viewed as side-by-side pairs on a 640x480 display. I recommend setting your browser window to approximately this value (or larger). The large charts are 480x360 and work well on a 1024x768 (or larger) display. Alternatively, you can display either size and print the charts out to use in a stereoscope (if you have one!).

You can select several features of the charts interactively:

1. Large vs. Small Charts (as described above).

2. Cross vs. Wide-Eyed Stereo Pairs (as described on the Stereo Views page).

3. Narrow vs. Wide Stereo Separations. This choice determines how much "depth" appears in the image. In "narrow" mode, only the nearest stars show much depth -- most of the stars will not show the 3-D effect, and will look like a "flat" background. In "wide" mode the depth is much greater, and many more stars will appear in 3-D, but the very nearest stars will be hard to focus on (they'll shift too much between the two images). Try both modes to see which one works best for a given set of star charts.

4. Chart coordinates. These are in the celestial coordinates right ascension and declination, which are analogous to longitude and latitude respectively. For historical reasons, right ascension is usually expressed in hours from 0 to 24, where 1 hour = 15 degrees. If you're familiar with star charts, and know the coordinates of a star or other object you are interested in, you can pick a chart covering a region of the sky you're interested in by searching through the list of coordinates for an appropriate choice.

You can also choose whether or not you would like a reference chart of the area, with stars and constellations identified, to be added to the page. Reference charts were prepared with the star program Voyager II, version 1.0, by Carina Software, and are centered on the same center points in the sky as the corresponding stereo charts.

Basic Chart Picker