OK, What do the graphics mean?

I'll post a better explanation of the screensaver graphics in the near future. But here's a short summary:

The green and blue arms represent the three LIGO instruments (at just two sites) whose data we are currently analyzing. Blue is the two instruments (2km, 4km) in Hanford, Washington. (If you look closely at the blue arms you'll see that they are actually made up of a pair of arms: half-length and full-length.) Green is the 4km instrument in Livingston, Louisiana.

The red arms represent the GEO instrument (0.6km) in Hannover, Germany.

These detector arms are correctly oriented but are NOT to scale!

If you have set your system clock to the correct time, the instruments are shown in the correct relationship to the celestial sphere (constellations). If you watch over the period of a day you'll see that they move around the celestial sphere once in the space of 24 hours.

The purple dots represent the known pulsars, which have been detected electromagnetically. Notice that these are clustered in the plane of the Galaxy (the Milky Way), predominantly torwards the center of the Galaxy.

The red dots represent the know supernova remenants. These too are clustered towards the center of the Galaxy. Note that these are of particular interest because some of these supernovae may have left behind a pulsar or spinning neutron star.

Finally, the red bulls-eye circle and crosshairs, and the right acension and declination shown in the bottom right, indicate the current sky position being searched.

We'll add some more information to the graphics in the near future, but for the moment we're concentrating on getting the internals of the search working well!

By the way, if you go to the WORK tab and right click on a running job, you'll find a 'SHOW GRAPHICS' option. If you select this, you'll get a graphics window. Now, you can use the right and left mouse buttons (and scroll) to change the size and orientation of the celestial sphere.