Starfield-Animations from 2018

Published:	11.12.2025

Published:

11.12.2025

In January 2017 I worked with Povray for the first time and tried out all kinds of things. In mid-2018 I created a 3D view of the neighborhood of our solar system with the help of an old star catalogue.

However I stopped when it just got interesting. There were some entries left in the catalogue, I had difficulties with finetuning of near and far, light and dark stars, it became more and more complicated. Apart from that, private trouble made life difficult, there was no time for Povray anymore.

In November 2025 I looked around for new star catalogues, found what I was looking for and immediately was fired with enthusiasm again. Before new renderings are ready, I will quickly present the old attempts, as a before/after comparison, so to speak.

If browser and video plugin allow it, the videos can be downloaded by right-clicking and "Save video as". To view the 3D videos, red and blue anaglyph glasses are required.

Our neighborhood
Flight through at Warp 9
Viewed from the outside

The animation shows about 80 light-years vertically, with the sun as a pink sphere in the center.
Alpha Centauri (here Rigil Ken) is 4.3 light years away from our solar system, Sirius 8.6 and Vega 25.

36 seconds - 1920x1080 px - 25 MB
1080 frames - 30 fps - 10 crf - lib264

36 seconds - 1920x1080 px - 42 MB
1080 frames - 30 fps - 10 crf - lib264

If you can fly around it, you can also fly right through it.
But there is still a lot of work waiting for me, it was only a quick shot at the time.

30 seconds - 1280x720 px - 9 MB
900 frames - 30 fps - 10 crf - lib264

30 Sekunden - 1280x720 px - 16 MB
900 frames - 30 fps - 10 crf - lib264

A small experiment with the existing data: What does the starry sky look like if you place all the stars at the same distance and look at it from the outside? To my surprise, the result was not as confusing as expected, only the constellations are horizontally flipped, left is right and right is left. Even without lines, the common constellations would be immediately recognizable.

36 seconds - 1280x720 px - 13 MB
1080 frames - 30 fps - 23 crf - lib264

36 seconds - 1280x720 px - 15 MB
1080 frames - 30 fps - 23 crf - lib264

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