Rendering and Reconstruction of Astronomical Objects

[abstract]

The beauty of space and of astronomical objects is always fascinating to people and give rise to enormous research efforts to discover the secrets of the Universe. To get an impression on how these objects look like from a different viewpoint than our terrestrial confined position, one has to visualize them in their three-dimensional shape.

We present a new visualization technique for the rendering of astronomical objects, like refection nebulae and provide two approaches for reconstructing the volumetric structure of spiral galaxies from conventional 2D images. Our interactive visualization tool renders the physically correct, commonly very colorful, appearance of arbitrary three-dimensional interstellar dust distributions surrounding illuminating stars. The proposed reconstruction algorithm incorporates computerized tomography methods as well as far-infrared information to plausibly recover to the shape of spiral galaxies. With our GPU-based volume rendering driving a non-linear optimization, we estimate the galaxy's dust density. The optimization refines the model by minimizing the differences between the rendered image and the original astronomical image.

These techniques can be used to create virtual fly-throughs of astronomical objects, such as reflection nebulae or spiral galaxies for either interactive desktop visualizations or scientifically accurate animations for educational purposes to gain a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the complex interaction of light and dust in real astrophysical settings.