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Information

The cosmic microwave background

This is the raw data from the Planck mission of the intensity fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. At the highest resolution it includes 50 million pixels of information.

For a selection of scientific papers on the subject see this paperscape graph. For some commentary on Planck's results, try the blog entries here, here or here. See the Planck Chromoscope for flat 2D maps.

You can use your mouse to control the view: click-drag will change the latitude/longitude, double click zooms in, and mouse scroll-wheel zooms in and out.

The following key bindings are also available: left, right, up, down (scroll the view), +, - (zoom), r (reset view), g, e, x (toggle items).

The raw data is tiled over a sphere using the Healpix scheme. WebGL and the three.js library are used for rendering.

For questions about this website you can contact me. This website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.