Milky Way
This visualization displays a 360-degree panorama of the Milky Way, captured by the European Southern Observatory, reprojected onto a stereographic projection to simulate the night sky as seen from Earth. The interactive animation rotates the view over time, allowing exploration of the entire celestial sphere. Built using WebGL and custom shaders, the code compiles vertex and fragment shaders to perform the inverse stereographic projection and image texture mapping in real time. The source equirectangular image is loaded as a texture, with mipmaps enabling accurate rendering during continuous motion.
AI-generated descriptionThis “magnificent 360-degree panorama” of the Milky Way was created by the European Southern Observatory. The source image is in equirectangular coordinates, and is reprojected here using the stereographic projection, simulating the view of the night sky from varying positions on Earth.
This interactive requires WebGL, but see an earlier, slower software implementation of raster reprojection for comparison.