Star Charts

Considering it would be 3-dimensional it might get hairy. Not saying it can't be done, just non-trivial.

Doesn't necessarily have to be 3d to get the jist of the distance between places. Just zoom in on key areas and make them 3d.

Fletcher:
Doesn’t necessarily have to be 3d to get the jist of the distance between places. Just zoom in on key areas and make them 3d.

In most cases, yes, but a few are likely to seem a lot closer than they actually are.

Could this be sketched out by one of us fans? We know the "real" cartography of our region of space. Wikipedia has a graphic that is not too bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars

Perhaps we could use that? It shows Barnard's Star at 5.96 light years away, Alpha Centauri at 4.35ly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/72_Herculis lists 72 Herculis (Tanna's system) at 47 ly from us.

Just found this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_twin

The list of stars there could very well be the list Ryk is using for his definition of "The Core".

Identifier Distance (ly) Stellar Temperature (K)

Tau Ceti [4] 11.9 G8V 5,344
40 Eridani [6] A 16.5 K1V 5,126
82 Eridani [7] 19.8 G8V 5,338
Delta Pavonis [9] 19.9 G8IV 5,604
HR 7722 [11] 28.8 K0V 5,166
Gliese 86 [12] A 35.2 K1V 5,163
54 Piscium [13] 36.1 K0V 5,129
V538 Aurigae [14] 39.9 K1V 3,500-5,000
HD 14412 [15] 41.3 G5V 5,432
HR 4587 [16] 42.1 G8IV 5,538
HD 172051 [17] 42.7 G5V 5,610
72 Herculis [18] 46.9 G0V 5,662
HD 196761 [19] 46.9 G8V 5,415
Nu² Lupi [20] 47.5 G4V 5,664

I'm so happy the website is up. I'm really looking forward to those star charts!

@Ryk: If you would sell posters with nice designed Season one Star Charts over this homepage, I would buy one and am certain several others would too 🙂

Am starting to get lost in space.

Hello to everybody!

just recently found this great SF series and read through episode 1 - 10 in less than a week! Awesome!!!
When I looked around for the next episode (when will it be released?????) I found this webpage .... and of course the Star Chart! This is sooo good!!! Wanted to thank everybody who developed it!.... It works really great and fast too! I love that you can zoom in and out and turn the whole chart and in addition focus on any star!!! Really great! There is just one thing that I have to say - it it very confusing to look at all the stars and not being able to see the whole stars in 3D like in a hologram! Of course I know that this is very difficult but.... 🙂 maybe maybe maybe it could be made to look 3D 🙂

Just a suggestion for better orientation and improved 3D feeling! The chart should include a pane that could either line up with the plane of the planets of a focused star or with the galactic plane. That plane would look like a projected disk with concentric rings showing the distance in lightyears to the focused star.

The stars should then have thin lines that either from above or below the plane connect to the plane with the respective distance from the focused star.

I know I can not very well explain it but I got the idea from a very old computergame I used to play way back in the old Commodore C64 days called "Elite" If you google for Elite C64 you will find it. The computer game simulated space fights with very crude graphic at a time nobody thought of 3D graphic cards! But the navigation screen was so intuitive so simple so good that even a 6 year old could instinctively understand it. Please take a look at the pictures! If somebody could program that into the Star Chart - that would make everything super clear for everybody!!! Please somebody take a look and let me know what you think about it!

So please keep up the great work! And thank you so much for taking the time to read my much too long commend!
🙂
edw999

Will there be individual planets on the star chart or just stars?

I very much like the star chart.
There is one question that bugs me however - where did you get the distances between each star? Getting distance list between sol and other stars is easy, but how did you find out distance say between 61 Cygni and Tau Ceti?

Actually, if anyone knows a formula that could allow me to calculate that based of Right Ascension, Declination and distance from Sun? Would be of great help in a RPG game I play 🙂
EDIT:
Actually nevemind that, I found this article: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/deepimpact/disczone/challenge_Moon_Distance.cfm
And managed to create a distance chart between all the stars in the "solar twin" article on Wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_twin)

@avanti The star chart uses built in algorithms to calculate distances based on their distance in relation to the focused star.

You can see distances from Sol originally because you are "focused" meaning that it is the center of your focus and when you move about the system it remains center.

You can select another star, the distance would be from the focused to the selected star.

Double click another star, or click the Focus button and it will focus, center, the selected star. At which point the distance will set to 0 and change accordingly based on your next selected star.

It looks as though you've found a way to garner much more information though 🙂 We're glad you're enjoying the star chart!

The Frontiers Saga Web Team

Thanks, I already figured out how to check the distances on the star chart 🙂
if anyone needs the distance table for whatever reason I can post it on google drive or something.