Owls-H1

The distribution of neutral hydrogen in the Universe is of fundamental importance as both a tracer of the underlying Dark Matter across cosmological distances and the basic fuel for star formation and galactic growth. A ground-breaking new radio telescope in Western Australia, the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, will revolutionise our view of this key quantity. To both predict and understand the results from this facility we need high resolution simulations of significant volumes of the Universe. Just such a series of simulations, with the accompanying datacubes, have been created in an international collaboration between researchers in the Netherlands, UK and ICRAR. This project involves the visualisation of these simulation in a manner that is able to cope with the large spatial dynamic ranges together with the orders of magnitude variations in the signal of the neutral hydrogen.

My goal is to create a cross platform, fast method of calculating volumetric data from SPH data that outputs to the native file formats of Drishti and POVray