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Abstract:
Astronomical objects are something fascinating to many people. This is the
reason why there is so much effort to explore the universe and try to
understand the principles
that formed it. Having gained a deeper understanding in the physics behind the
visual appearance, this knowledge can be used to visualize the
three-dimensional shape of astronomical objects. This is useful to get to know
astronomical objects
from different viewpoints than our confined terrestrial viewpoint, which
essentially is a static two-dimensional projection of the real
three-dimensional shape of an object.
In this work, focus is laid on bipolar planetary nebulae, a very colorful
appearance in the night sky which consists of a central star illuminating its
surrounding gas and dust clouds. An approach to recover the three-dimensional
distribution of the gas and the dust surrounding the star will be presented.
This is done using optical and radio wavelength observations as input, driven
by a non-linear optimization to minimize the difference between the
reconstructed model and the observed data. The results are visualized using a
hardware accelerated volume rendering technique. Using the visualization
technique and the recovered model, virtual ights around the objects using
arbitrary viewpoints can be generated, for example for scientific visualization
or educational purposes.
