Re: (TFT) Re: TFT Digest V4 #225

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 5:25 AM, David Bofinger wrote:
> Jack Vance had a good subversion of this in one of his Demon Princes novels.
>
> The hero meets a girl who grew up as a slave of the villain, on a
> planet whose location is unknown. The hero gets in his spaceship with
> her and says, "Look for a constellation that's familiar. It'll be
> distorted, maybe it'll be smaller than you're used to, and it may have
> extra stars in it." When she points one out he drives the ship toward
> it, working on the theory that the least-distorted part of a skyfield
> is the one behind you. After zero or more false starts (can't
> remember) the stars get more and more familiar to her and when they
> look right they check every habitable planet by hand.
>
> No mess, no magic, no hand-waving, no need for massive computers. Just
> common sense.
>

...
?
......
??
Ouch!
<tries to rub brain through temples to get the cramp out>
I haven't read this one so I'm just postulating here but this approach
seems VERY limited to me.
Hummm.... interesting question here.
How many stars are there on average in a constellation?
88 constellations with 1564 stars total from the roughly 10,000 naked
eye visible stars from Earth says Wikipedia.
So a rough estimate of 18 stars per.
Of course Cassiopeia only has 5... hard to imagine one with less but
I'm not sure what the upper and lower limits are.
I don't think it would take many parsecs to get out of the useful
range of this method... but again it's more of a guess at this point.
I'd have to really look at this to get a better idea.
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