Tour Through Orion Flight Path

compiled by Phillip Dukes

Download the Tour Through Orion Flight Path with Partiview and related data files
 

A flight path visiting several of the interesting stars in the Orion Constellation is provided for Partiview and the Digital Universe distributed by the American Museum of Natural History/Hayden Planetarium.

PC Instructions: Click on Orion_Flight_Path.bat to start the program on a regular single screen, or on Orion_Flight_Path_geowall.bat to start the program on a GeoWall system. You can control which objects turn on at startup by editing the .cf files; at present all objects are turned on.

Linux Instructions: make sure the CSH files are executable ("chmod +x blah.csh") then type "./blah.csh" from the Linux prompt where the Windows instructions say "click on blah.bat".

Navigation Instructions

The trick to navigation is to press a mouse button down, move the mouse, and release the mouse button. Navigation is inertia-based, so whatever you were doing when the mouse button is released continue to happens.

• Rotation : left click & hold.
• Zooming: Right click (and hold!) the mouse and move up and down. (If you have a Mac with a one-button mouse, press the option key as you click that button.)
• Stopping motion: click once with the mouse. Don't move the mouse while the mouse button is down.
• Quit: press escape.

Press buttons to turn background stars and constellations off and on.

Pre-Programmed Flight Path

A flight path is included and pre-loaded, you can change the flight path by editing the .cf file. The flight path flies through the Orion Constellation pausing at selected stars.
Stops at:

1. HD38529: a dim 6.5 visual magnitude star 138 ly from the Earth, 6.5 times more luminous than the Sun. HD38529 is known to have two planets orbiting it. One at 0.13 AU and 0.8 times the mass of Jupiter and another at 3.7 AU and 13 times the mass of Jupiter.
2. Bellatrix: A hot blue-white gaint at 240 ly from the Earth. It has 9 solar masses and is 6400 times as luminous as the Sun. Bellatrix has been used as a standard for the measurement of stellar brightness. Bellatrix may have already ceased hydrogen fusion at its core and is destined to become an orange gaint within a few million years.
3. Betelgeuse: A red supergaint star, Betelgeuse is 600 times the size of the Sun and is 60,000 times as luminous. A distance of 425 ly from the Earth, it is due to explode as a supernova within 2 million years. When it does it will appear as bright as the moon.
4. Rigel: A blue supergaint star, Rigel is 40,000 times the luminosity of the Sun and with a surface temperture of 11,000 K is twice as hot. Rigel is actually a triple star with two smaller companions orbiting around it. Rigel is 70 times larger than the Sun and has 17 solar masses. This makes Rigel a possible candidate to become a rare oxygen-neon white dwarf.
5. Orion Cluster: As viewed from Earth using a small telescope, 4 stars of visible magnitude 5-8 are seen in a configuration called the "Trapezium". The trapezium is the core of an incredibly dense star cluster born out of the gasses and dust in the surrounding nebula less than one million years ago.
6. Alnilam: The most distant naked eye star in the Orion Constellation, Alnilam is 375,000 times the Sun's luminosity. A tremendious steller wind blows off of Alnilam with a speed of 2000 km/s and a mass flow rate that is 20 million times that of the Sun. Only 4 million years old, Alnilam's internal hydrogen fusion is shutting down and it will some day become a red supergiant far larger and more luminous than Betelgeuse.
7. Sun: We next fly back to our Sun.