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GAIACraft - Realistic Milky Way

GAIACraft - Realistic Milky Way

A render of the GAIA DR3 dataset with 1.8 billion real stars converted into a Minecraft skybox.

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Compatibility

Minecraft: Java Edition

26.2-snapshot-7
26.1.x
1.21.11

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Details

Licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0
Published last month

This is an incredibly accurate whole-sky rendition of our Milky Way Galaxy for Minecraft using a publically available scientific dataset and color calibration to match what the night sky really looks like.

To use this pack you need to have the Skyboxify mod installed. Simply drag and drop into your resource pack folder to install this, then enable it in-game.

About The Data

GAIA was a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency that catalogued over 1.8 billion stars in our galaxy. The project accurately recorded the position, magnitude, color, and spectrum for these stars and is available as a public dataset with the DR3 release. This is one of my favorite scientific datasets of all time, and I have been wanting to find a way to render it to an image.

This resource pack is not a picture of the Milky Way, but rather a simulated rendering using the GAIA dataset which reconstructs star color and location in the sky then converts it into a skybox for Minecraft. Each star is assumed to be a gaussian PSF one pixel wide in FWHM. Once rendered, I use an Asinh stretch to adjust brightness of the final image.

GAIA DR3 is licensed under the CC BY-NC 3.0 License and my work here adopts a similar license (see project license for details). My remixing of the GAIA dataset is described above.