Resumen
The article highlights how a 40-billion-pixel Orion Nebula visualization was rendered for a 9.11-million- pixel display at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of dust and gas six light-years across, some 1,500 light-years from Earth, in Milky Way Galaxy. It is the closest example of a stellar nursery in which the majority of new stars are formed in the galaxy. More than 1,500 stars make up the Trapezium cluster at the heart of the nebula. Volume rendering is the process of converting a 3D volume into a 2D image. Before deciding which renderer to use, the rendering complexity was analyzed. For each individual image on the dome, 9.1 million pixels would have to be rendered. The visualization would run 2.5 minutes, which, at 30 frames per second, would require 40 billion pixels, or more than 100GB of images. Tens or hundreds of millions of pixels enable all kinds of visualization in diverse scientific fields, including chemistry and biology besides astronomy and cosmology.