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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.