Globular Clusters

Globular Clusters are some of the more beautiful objects that you can observe with a modest amateur telescope. They are also of interest to observational researchers. Globular Clusters can contain a million or more stars:

They are grouped in a "halo" around the galactic core. In the artwork below, you can see a handful of globular clusters surrounding the extended core of the galaxy.

The virtual reality model below allows you to observe the distribution of known globular clusters in our galaxy.

What you need to view this virtual reality -

If when you click on the link below you do not see a view of the virtual world , your browser probably needs to have a VRML viewer installed. 

Get a player here.  (Blaxxun also works with IE))

What you'll see:

You'll see the Milky Way galactic disk and central bulge as well as the Sun. You'll see representations for all globular clusters closer than 30 kiloparsecs.

Moving around: I usually walk in a little closer and then use the "Study" function to wander around.  The "Restore" command is useful for when I get disoriented and want to start again.

If you hover over the clusters, the link field on your browser's status line will show the name of the cluster.  However, this web site does not have files for the links.  If you accidentally click on a link, your browser will complain that it is a dead link.

Click here to view the virtual reality (100k).

Acknowledgements

• The globular data I used came from William Harris of McMaster University whose site has up-to-date globular data.

Limitations

• Although the general distribution of the clusters appears correct in the animation, the specific clusters are sometimes not where I'd expect them.  For example, M13 correctly appears in the model as "up and to the right" when viewed from the Earth. However,  M92 appears above and to the right of M13 rather than to the left as it does in reality. I assume the data I used was correct.  I programmatically pulled it into my model, so there were no transcription errors.   Whether this inaccuracy is due to my mishandling the VMRL or from my improper use of the 3D coordinate system, or from parallax (?) or other factors, I don't know.   Still, the animation gives a  good feel for the cluster distribution in our Galaxy. 

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