VISUALIZATION

The National Science Foundation has awarded $1.1 million to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and other partners to produce a television program, a planetarium show, and educational materials exploring the current scientific understanding of black holes. The visualization team at NCSA will collaborate with Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc., the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) [http://www.dmns.org/], and astronomy experts from across the country to explore and visualize recent discoveries about black holes. The project was initiated with $250,000 in seed money from NASA's high-energy GLAST telescope project. NCSA's Experimental Technologies Division, led by Donna Cox, will produce high-resolution animated visualizations of cosmic phenomena, working with data generated by a computer simulation. Visitors will witness the birth of stars, the collision of giant galaxies, and a simulated flight through the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. Cox's team has previously produced high-resolution animations for productions such as the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage," NOVA's acclaimed HDTV cosmology program "Runaway Universe," and the recent HDTV NOVA special "Hunt for the Supertwister." "The only group I can imagine being able to work with visualizations this large and complex is Donna Cox's group at NCSA," Lucas says, citing the group's unique experience with dome shows. The group previously produced the visualizations for the space show "The Search for Life: Are We Alone?" for the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, as well as the planetarium's inaugural dome presentation, "Passport to the Universe." The large-dome digital planetarium show will debut at the Charles C. Gates Planetarium at DMNS; the planetarium's dome has 11 "footprints," each of which is 1,280 X 1,024 pixels. That adds up to more than 14.4 million pixels that will transport viewers into the heart of our galaxy. "The dome is so immersive, audiences can feel like they're actually out in space," says Lucas. "And the data-driven simulations produced by Cox and her group will provide a realistic and very dramatic view of what you'd see in the vicinity of these cosmic monsters." The planetarium show will be distributed globally by Spitz, Inc. "The television program and the planetarium show are a wonderful way to reach millions of people across the country and to introduce them to the grandeur and mystery of our universe," Cox says. "These projects are entertaining and exciting, but they're also a form of informal science education and a way to make state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge science accessible to everyone." The planetarium show is tentatively slated to debut early in 2006.