Navigating the Universe

A nearby galaxy database can be seen by starting partiview with the command partiview_mw, moving out of the Milky Way, and turning off the stars. Leave the Milky Way representation with ``mwpoly'' on. It may also help to turn on the coordinate axes with a distance scale using the command ``censize 100000'' for 100,000 parsecs (or another scale of your choosing. The origin of the scale will be at the Earth. and the x-axis will extend from the Sun back through the center of the Milky Way about 8000 parsecs away.

1. Turn on ``g31=nbglxy'', turn off the stars, and move out to see the nearby galaxies. There is some duplication between the catalog of nearby galaxies and the local group galaxies, so you may toggle between them as needed. It may help to turn their luminosity up. Shift and right click on ``g31=nbglxy'', select ``alpha'', and move the slider to the right. Go out far enough that the complete catalog of galaxies looks like a large ball centered in the display window. With this group selected (right click), if you type eval color const 0 1 1 in the command field it will set the color of all the galaxies to cyan (red=0, green=1, blue=1) which might also help to make them more visible.