Fly Through a Star-Studded Nebula [video]

Here's a link to the original video (without the animated text overlay):

If you like this kind of stuff, take a look at Space Engine: http://spaceengine.org/

I could have sworn I'd seen something very much like this either at the Hayden Planetarium in New York or in an episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's remake of Cosmos. The shockwaves from the stars, all of it, seems familiar. I found it of course utterly beautiful and very compelling. This one presumably is based on better data, and is all the more fascinating for it.

Can you imagine living on a world orbiting one of those stars?

I wonder how it would affect myths and culture to look up at that every night...

I wonder how fast we're moving in the visualization. A million c? A billion?

Right in between those.

The Orion Nebula is about 24 light years across, a million c would mean we pass through it in about 750 seconds. The point of view clearly moves faster than that. How hard exactly is hard to judge (I think it also changes speed) but it looks like going through the whole nebula would take somewhere between 75s (10 million c) and 7.5s (100 million c).

Very mesmerizing; too bad for the usual animated-text-overlay thing so popular these days.