"You're seeing the actual density and location of 100,000 stars in this view," says Google, by way of a short narrative for its latest Chrome-based web browser visualisation -- and it only gets cooler from here on out.

Whisking you through a vivid 3D map of the local universe, Chrome's 100,000 Stars page hones in on the Sun before shooting out to give a view of the solar system and then the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years from Earth, before taking in that spectacular view of 100,000 stellar bodies.

The page is the product of Google's Chrome Experiments workshop, which shows off what HTML 5 can do (and, in this case, Google Chrome's support for WebGL, CSS3D and Web Audio). It's the same workshop that gave us Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk's The Exquisite Forest, a platform for the public to collaborate and develop animations for a Tate Modern exhibit. With 100,000 Stars, data and source imagery used was all drawn from Nasa and the ESA, and the project was collated by the Google Data Team -- however the view from space is an artist's impression, hence the compelling ethereal glow.


When you're done zooming hundreds of light years out at the drag of a mouse, there are a few educational nuggets to be found as well. Yes, it's nice to know that it if the laws of physics were set aside it would take a plane 18 years to fly to the Sun; but there are also 87 major local stars named and detailed when users hover over and click on them. The system immediately zooms in and gives a brief description (extracted from Wikipedia) of what you need to know -- how many light years the star is from the Sun or what constellation it's in. It's probably the best way Wired.co.uk could have dreamt of finding out that the Epsilon Sagittarii binary star system forms the base of the archer's bow in Sagittarius and is located 143 light years away -- mainly because we got to spin around one of the luminous purple orbs at speed while watching its partner star orbit. Luyten's Star, a red dwarf star in Canis Minor, looks positively lonely by comparison, and watch out for Alpha Herculis (it's a blinder).

Of course this collection of stars is just a speck among the Milky Way's 300 to 400 billion (zoom out and see), but the artist's impression gives an incredible and mind-boggling sense of our (tiny) place in the galaxy. Zoom right out and drag the mouse up and down for a 3D look at the mass of stars that makes up the galaxy.

All this set to the eerie backdrop of music penned by Sam Hulick, composer for Mass Effect -- what more could we ask for? Perhaps a pindrop facility, so amateur astronomers can flag up where in the nights' sky they've spotted an unidentified piece of orbiting space junk? Otherwise, we're pretty content spinning around the solar system on our Retina Displays, and losing our bearings a little along the way.