A Study of 3D Visualization of Astronomical Data Based on the Blender

Astronomy is entering a new era of discovery. Employing new facilities for observation and computation will routinely generate data in large amounts. It becomes increasingly important to efficiently process and display astronomical data. While visualization and analysis tools specialized for astronomy are being developed, it is also a trend to modify and integrate software packages in other scientific disciplines to work for astronomical data. As an example of the trend, we adapt the Blender, a graphic software tool with a flexible user interface and an enhanced development environment. In this paper we present the implementation of two Python modules as plugins for the Blender to display 3D spectral-line data cube and make 3D animations of N-body simulations.