3d Map of our Solar Neighborhood using three.js

A few months ago I stumbled on three.js, a library which exposes a simple WebGL interface.  I was really impressed at both the performance of WebGL and how easy three.js made building high-performance animations in the browser.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to put together a visualization I’ve been looking for for a while–a map of our solar neighborhood, showing all the closest stars to our own.  The data-set I used was the HYG database of nearby stars, which is a compilation of all stars within 50 parsecs.  I’ve cross-referenced stars against wikipedia where available.   The site is available here:

http://uncharted.bpodgursky.com/

Screenshot:

The whole project is open-source, hosted here.

The project isn’t nearly as polished as I would have liked (there’s a long to-do list on the github page), but I’m trying to commit to releasing projects rather than letting them die silently.  I’m hoping to be able to iterate on the remaining issues over the next few months.

Thoughts, suggestions, or contributions always welcome here or on the GitHub page.