Introduction

Partiview is a software package for 3-D interactive data visualization of the universe from the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/du/partiview.html

Its standard databases scaled to render the neighborhood of the Milky Way include the Hipparcos star catalog, and comprehensive catalogs of clusters, nebulae, supernova remnants, and the Local Group galaxies. We have augmented it with other nearby galaxies to extend the range out to most of those in the NGC catalog. Another standard database specifically for extragalactic visualization includes the 2df survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Information on objects in all of the basic catalogs are accessible directly from

http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/CDS.html

and from the Sloan Survey at

http://www.sdss.org/

Partiview uses a Cartesian coordinate system, with the origin placed at the Sun and $XY$ the plane of the galaxy. $X$ is along the line from the Sun to the Milky Way center, and $Z$ points to the North Galactic Pole. Database distances are measured in parsecs. Distances for nearby stars are derived from parallax, and for galaxies usually from radial velocities and the Hubble Law.

Run the script partiview_mw to start partiview with the Milky Way database. It will load star and object catalogs for the Milky Way, including the Hipparcos catalog of nearby stars and the NGC catalog of nebulae and clusters, the Local Group Galaxies, and the Tully catalog of nearby galaxies. For navigating far outside our galaxy, use the command line partiview_extragalactic. This will not load the full stellar catalogs and will add the Sloan Survey and other distant galaxies.

A local copy of the User's Guide for Partiview is available online through our help index:

http://www.physics.louisville.edu/help/

Navigate through the help directories to the Partiview User's Guide. It is available off-site directly from the Partiview web site.

To really learn how to use this program's many features you may want to experiment while you keep the Guide up on the screen to try some of its examples. However, for a start, try following the instructions below to for an introduction to Partiview and to answer some simple questions about the large scale structure in the distribution of galaxies.