Near-Solar Space

[bartmoss]

Hmmm. When I enter Mu Herculis into SIMBAD then I get the same star as on Wikipedia et al. With the coordinates you posted I get V* Mu Her. Alright, nice find. I do not have to understand how astronomy can be such a crappy inaccurate science. *shakes fists at the stars* Give us FTL already!

[Hungry Donner]

When I refer to stars I generally use the classic Greek letter/constellation combinations if they have them (and then a Gliese # or HIP # if they don't). It was surprising to see some confusion come about here. At least this does confirm that the two stars are within 7.7 ly!

http://www.stellar-database.com looks like a great resource, hopefully I'll have a chance to compare it to my current work sometime this week.

[bartmoss]

stellar-database.com is nice but is woefully incomplete. I am using it and SIMBAD together for the best results.

[Hungry Donner]

I was using SIMBAD before but have recently moved to NStED, it tends to have the same technical information found in SIMBAD but often has a distance from the Sun and also gives estimates on habitability zones.

[bartmoss]

Hmm dunno I prefer simbad, performance seems better too. Anyway, never hurts to have alternatives.

Does anybody have a generic star system generation system and tool btw? Something roughly like gurps space, but automatable? I found a spreadhseet based solution but it's crap. The various sites I found are all not usable for one reason or another, usually because they are based on some limited RPG's system. StarGen, the "scientific" generator, just generates systems with habitable planets, and seems fairly useless except as a distraction.

[bartmoss]

I've been working on this whenever my time allows, unfortunately that's not too often. Still, I added a whole bunch of stars.

Actual star map:



(Sorry the PDF broke, so I am using the PNG now - no time this morning to figure out what went wrong while printing to pdf.)

"Relational" map:



No fundamental changes, really. Assuming 1 week per jump (it is almost always less) the travel time from Earth to the furthest systems on this map would be about half a year.

[cfds]

I have to update and clean up my program and send you a new version. Some sneak peaks: The big cluster is connected to Sol: Groombrigde 1830, Alula Australis, Ross 104, Gamma Leo C, Gliese 1111. The Arcturus-cluster is also connected (actually via Groombridge 1830), the Wolf 1056 cluster not, neither is the cluster with Gliese 114.1. The Gamma Pavonis cluster is also not connected.

[bartmoss]

Neat - good way to ensure I didn't miss anything essential. Thanks.

Do you think it would be easy to modify your program to check if the Sol cluster potentially continues "off map"? At this point I am sure it does, but still. I guess the condition would be if any of the stars in the cluster are within 7.7 ly of the max distance from sol of any star in the dataset, then it could hypothetical continue "off map", but if all stars are further away from that edge than 7.7 ly then we know it is a limited cluster...

This would imply you can detect entire clusters instead of just routes tho.

[bartmoss]

Or actually:

Find all stars within 7.7ly of the "edge" - check if they have paths to Sol - problem solved. Right?

[bartmoss]

Yup, had forgotten the link AD Leonis <-> Alula Australis on my relational map. Looks much nicer now.