GLEAM

About GLEAM Android App

This app allows you to see the sky at radio wavelengths, by viewing what astronomers found from performing the GaLactic and GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA survey of the sky. The MWA is the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope located in Western Australia. The colours you see are "radio colours", where red is 72-103 MHz, green is 103-134 MHz, and blue is 139-170 MHz. Whether an object is red or blue immediately tells astronomers about the astrophysics of that object.

The view you see is projected as if you were floating in space, with your head pointing toward the Earth's (rotational) North pole, and your feet toward the South. Since the survey was performed in Australia, the North is blank, but if you look South, you'll see the sky light up with objects: our own Milky Way Galaxy appears as a bright band of glowing synchrotron stretching across the sky; the Magellanic Clouds hover around the South Celestial Pole, and hundreds of thousands of other radio galaxies dot the rest of the sky. If your phone has a gyro then you can simply swivel your phone around to see the sky; on any phone you can touch and drag the survey to move it around.

You can also use Google Cardboard to see a 3D view of GLEAM; although note that the 3D is representative, not astronomically accurate -- or you wouldn't be able to see any 3D at all! The Milky Way appears closer, the Magellanic Clouds more distant, and other radio galaxies appear more distant still, and distributed throughout the depth of the universe. You can find out more about the survey at http://gleam.icrar.org, and see the universe in other wavelengths on our interactive viewer, GLEAMoscope, at http://gleamoscope.icrar.org.