MPI-I-2004-NWG3-001
Axisymmetric reconstruction and 3D visualization of bipolar planetary nebulae
Magnor, Marcus
May 2004, 20 pages.
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Status: available - back from printing
Determining the true shape of distant astronomical objects is a
challenging task, given that terrestrial observations provide only one
viewpoint. For this task, bipolar planetary nebulae are interesting
objects of study because of their pronounced axial symmetry. Making use of
these properties, we present a technique to automatically recover the
axisymmetric structure of bipolar planetary nebulae from conventional
two-dimensional images. With GPU-based volume rendering driving a
non-linear optimization, we estimate the nebula's local emission density
as a function of its radial and axial coordinates, and we recover the
orientation of the nebula relative to Earth. The optimization refines the
nebula model and its orientation by minimizing the differences between the
rendered image and the original astronomical image. The resulting nebula
model enables realistic 3D visualizations, e.g. for educational purposes
in planetarium shows.
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URL to this document: https://domino.mpi-inf.mpg.de/internet/reports.nsf/NumberView/2004-NWG3-001
BibTeX
@TECHREPORT{Magnor2004,
AUTHOR = {Magnor, Marcus},
TITLE = {Axisymmetric reconstruction and 3D visualization of bipolar planetary nebulae},
TYPE = {Research Report},
INSTITUTION = {Max-Planck-Institut f{\"u}r Informatik},
ADDRESS = {Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85, 66123 Saarbr{\"u}cken, Germany},
NUMBER = {MPI-I-2004-NWG3-001},
MONTH = {May},
YEAR = {2004},
ISSN = {0946-011X},
}