Real Stars in Charted Space
- Thread starter Garnfellow
- Start date
Someone in one of the earlier threads, or perhaps this one somewhere, called it a "Fool's Errand" to attempt to place real stars on the 2d traveller map. I'm starting to get a feel for why that is. Here is a slice of volume of our local space, stars as red points, black arrow to the (true) galactic core, blue arrow toward the true deneb. The green lines represent the boundaries of a subsector in the mapping plane. There is just no way to realistically reduce the map to fit in any remote kind of accuracy in 2 dimensions.
It's fun to tinker with, but a lot of the fundamentals of traveller are too contrary to physics and astronomy to try to fit the game into a realistic setting. I'll keep hopefully watching for more attempts to deal with the 2d mapping though.
It's fun to tinker with, but a lot of the fundamentals of traveller are too contrary to physics and astronomy to try to fit the game into a realistic setting. I'll keep hopefully watching for more attempts to deal with the 2d mapping though.
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Canonically, the Deneb of "Deneb Sector" in the 3rd Imperium is not actually the star known to 21st century Terrans as Deneb.
sudnadja, this is really interesting work!
sudnadja, this is really interesting work!
My guess is that it was an oversight.
(And the large-scale galactic map on the TravellerMap website is a far more recent addition as compared to the original stellar data and "paper" Traveller Map of Charted Space, which go all the way back to about 1980).
They are not located canonically, to my knowledge.
With D&D and the OSR there are several example of people from back in the day like Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax using a 70s era reference as a template for some map or some other concept.
The problem it rare for somebody to remember what was exactly used. For example Dave Arneson used an old map (drawn in the 16th or 17th century) of holland inverted and flipped for the campaign map of his blackmoor campaign. Nobody knows which one he used .
For this issue, you would have to figure out the exact reference book the GDW folks were using when they came up with the map for the Solomani Rim. Once you have that then likely what they did to place things will make sense.
Well, it is heavily implied by the terms "Coreward" etc present on the earliest maps. You could imagine a point very early on when sectors were not strictly aligned with the cardinal directions, but I suspect it was simply not considered.
It would be interesting to know what resources (i.e. books) were used by GDW to even guess at star placements back in the dark ages. I've also been curious what the source of the star background for the Imperium poster was.
Re: navigation points, my preference would likely be more for those variable stars with fixed regular pulses of long periods, giving one a timestamp as well as location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Cepheid_variable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Cepheid_variable
Delta Cephei is in The Beyond.
The galactic core is at very close to 18h right ascension, and so is Barnard's Star, which on traveller maps is placed more in the trailing direction - as if it were at 15h or so. Alpha Centauri is at 14h itself and placed as if if were 12h.
So that specific information is correct, at least as far as right ascension of the galactic core is concerned, the problem is they didn't really follow that. Also, using right ascension alone with no declination is misleading, right ascension of 0 and 12h is pointing more or less straight up and down out of the plane of the galaxy.
It's regrettable that in March the Earth is in the trailing position relative to the sun rather than spinward, otherwise we could celebrate that season as the Spinward Marches!
IIRC, The hand-drawn map had a note in the margin saying that all stars shown were within +/- 10o Declination.
Deneb is at +45 degrees Declination, Spica at -11 degrees, Alpha Piscium at 2.7 degrees, Cursa at -5.08 degrees, Enif at 9.87 degrees and Baten Kaitos at -10.3 degrees. The Pelican Nebula is at 44 degrees.
Of course, +45 degrees can help rather than hurt in terms of aligning it to the galactic plane depending on right ascension. Deneb is almost perfectly on the galactic plane, Spica has the majority of its spatial component out of the galactic plane, Alpha Piscium is also more in the Z axis than either x or y, let's see,
So for Deneb, Spica, Alpha Piscium, Cursa, Enif and Baten Kaitos they are 2,51,-56,-25, -31 and -68 degrees out of the plane of the galaxy, respectively.
It would be interesting to know the methodology for which stars were selected for the original map. If it were me, and I were drawing a map two dimensionally, I'd select bright stars that are in or very close to in the galactic plane relative to the Sun. Deneb is the best choice of those listed, but it seems to have its position distorted in the other two axis instead.
Perhaps Hadar, Deneb, Shaula, Mimosa, and Betelgeuse?
Code:
Acrux 0.77 -4.23 325.777ly -0.363251
Rigel Kentaurus A -0.01 4.34 4.38981ly -0.685362
Rigel Kentaurus B 1.35 5.70 4.40009ly -0.687905
Hadar 0.61 -4.82 397.448ly 1.25047
Deneb 1.25 -7.13 1547.44ly 1.99759
Shaula 1.62 -5.05 702.105ly -2.215
Mimosa 1.25 -3.47 286.684ly 3.17911
Alnath 1.65 -1.37 130.887ly -3.74409
Capella 0.08 -0.479 42.15ly 4.56795
Capella Ab 0.96 0.401 42.15ly 4.56992
Gacrux 1.59 -0.564 87.834ly 5.64982
Sirius -1.44 1.45 8.59093ly -8.88701
Altair 0.76 2.20 16.7546ly -8.9094
Betelgeuse 0.45 -6.02 641.78ly -8.95761
Adhara 1.5 -3.97 403.963ly -11.3291
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There appears to be a OTU Algol, with the same stellar configuration as the real Algol (A5, B8 and K2 IV stars).
Positioning is dramatically off, the Map Algol is at {-14.7224, -24.5} from Terra, and the real Algol should be more like {-27.5, -6.8}, but radial distance is approximately correct.
What does it take to be considered Canonical? Deneb appears to not be the real world Deneb, even though the stellar configuration is the same - is that the case with Algol as well?
Oh. You mean Sagitarian sic Subsector?
I just mapped it to Aldebaran 3012.
(Having now looked at the map, considerng the 205° longitude, and a distance of 27.4 parsecs, I'd probably go with Aldebaran 3108 or possibly 3207, both in Firdausl Subsector.)
FWIW, the "Little Guys" from 2300 would be from 3015.
Kinda out of the way if you're on your way to the Pleiades....
(I'd probably move these guys to Neworld 0110 or 0209. Even more out of the way.)
(Guess I should mention that "Littleendia" revolves around BD+05°1117/HD 42182)
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Most of them should be located in Holowon (Tahahorol) Sector at (-1, -6) Imperial.
Uh, no. It's hard enough trying to figure out where they're supposed to be in J2000
We don't even know where they are now. The light left those stars hundreds or thousands of years ago. We're seeing now where they were then.