The student may place lenses, mirrors, screens, and light sources on a holding bar to study the light rays in detail. The Virtual Planetarium allows facts of our solar system to be explored. By navigating freely in 3-dimensional space, the student can study the planets' orbits relative to the ecliptic plane from different viewpoints. In addition calculations of physical laws in real-time enable the realistic representations of the planets' motions. Discovering supernovae explosions, neutron stars, black holes, or quasars are some of the outcomes of modern astronomy.
Virtual astronomy can help to illustrate and explain some of the exciting cosmic facts.
The combination of real images, videos and VRML models of those examples clarifies the important results from that recent field of research. In here a student might be instructed to observe and measure the distance of a galaxy from the oscillation period of a cepheid star. Or perhaps consider two penetrating galaxies, where the mass of the inner galaxy can be determined from the rotational period of the outer galaxies' debris. Although the project consists of a wide range of different topics in Physics and Astronomy, the underlying structure of each individual application is very similar. Promising future developments like MPEG-4 will be used as they become generally available.