Sample animations made with partiview

(see also: Flypaths in Partiview)
Fly from the solar system towards and through the Orion constellation, and see how Orion's 3-dimensional shape establishes itself (animated GIF, about 946k, xanim will consume about 70MB). The data is the standard Hipparcos bright star catalogue that comes with partiview. In standard speed this movie (400 frames) runs 40 seconds, which corresponds to a speed of almost warp 1000 (Roddenberry's old formula, with the Hollywood corrected version it would be around 9.9999999 which is certainly is well above the maximum boosted subspace radio speed quoted in the Startek Encyclopedia [17 lightyears in 45 minutes, or warp 9.9999]) You can also download a bigger version here (1.2MB), you really don't want to know how much memory this will consume in xanim.
Now orbit Orion, around the middle belt star. Notice it's much further away (about twice) from the other two belt stars. (animated GIF, about 2.5MB). You can also download a bigger version here (3.6MB). A C-shell-script, orion5.csh contains instructions how this animation was created (you will also need the awk script wf2movie.awk). You can look a the finally produced orion5.sh script.