CHAMPAIGN, IL -- More than 2.5 million people viewed visualizations created by NCSA's Virtual Director team in a Nova episode that debuted on PBS Jan. 8 called "Death Star." The program probes the mysteries of gamma-ray bursts, sudden flashes of high-energy photons coming from deep space and the most powerful celestial explosions since the Big Bang. The program incorporated images originally created by NCSA for "Runaway Universe," a Nova show that first aired in November 2000. "Runaway Universe" featured animations developed from a database of 35,000 observed galaxies compiled by Brent Tully, a University of Hawaii astrophysicist, and from simulations of large-scale cosmic structures done by Alliance Cosmology team members Jeremiah Ostriker and Paul Bode of Princeton University. The Tully data was transformed into animated High Definition TV footage using Virtual Director, NCSA software created by Donna Cox, an NCSA researcher and professor in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, Robert Patterson, an NCSA researcher programmer, and Marcus Thiebaux of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. NCSA's Stuart Levy maintains the Virtual Director software and extends its capabilities. Virtual director allows researchers to navigate through complex scientific visualizations and record and edit their movements through the data with a virtual camera. In essence, the software allows the user to direct the simulation and create a movie. "Runaway Universe" has aired several times and is now available on video. An estimated 5 million people have seen that show. For more on the "Death Star" episode of Nova, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gamma/. For more on "Runaway Universe," see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/universe/. Story used courtesy of NCSA's Access