Oral Abstract

Invited talk (I5.1) Jacqueline Faherty (American Museum of Natural History)

Theme: Data visualisation from line plots to augmented & virtual reality

Visualizing a billion stars

On April 25, 2018, the European space agency (ESA) released the second catalog of the Gaia mission. Contained in these data are nearly 1.4 billion parallaxes and proper motions, over 7 million radial velocities, photometric data in Gaia’s three bands (G, R, and B), variability information, and effective temperatures for a subset of objects. The Gaia results provide a unique opportunity for astronomers and data visualizers. Stellar positions and velocities enable us to map the Milky Way and examine the dynamics of stellar streams, co-moving companions, hypervelocity stars, nearby moving groups, and solar system encounters. From a visualization perspective, real time rendering of Gaia data is a challenge. In this presentation, I will show the results of our visualization efforts with the Gaia catalog at the American Museum of Natural History. The visuals generated for this talk isolate scientifically rich data and stories, which can lead to scientific discovery and will illuminate Gaia data for the general public.