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

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

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 6:18 AM, Joe wrote:

>> So Enterprise likely headed toward Sagittarius in its mission because
>> of the increasing density.
>
> One of the best things you can do astronomically is to get a pair of
> binoculars on a summer evening and look into the heart of Sagittarius.
> "Set the controls to the heart of the sun^H^H^Hgalaxy"
>

Careful with that ax you Joe...

So I talked to the Little People about this last night and they showed
me a little bit about constellations I'd forgotten.
Gemini has Castor and Pollux.
Pollux is the brightest "star" of the constellation and is about 35
light-years out.
Bayer gives Castor the "A"lpha but its actually a 6 star system 50
light-years out.
At a quarter inch a light-year and an inch per hex Pollux sits about 9
hexes out and the Castor system is about 12 and a half hexes out.
Now I think I get the idea that if your moving directly away from
Gemini (and therefore more or less toward the heart of the
sun^H^H^Hgalaxy) then it's not going to distort as much as it would if
you were moving at right angles to the apparent formation.
The problem I'm having is twofold.
The first part is with the distortion of the rest of the apparent sky
as "I" use familiar constellations to "jump" to others.
Not only would this be difficult to do with lots of the sky distorted
but the distortion could result in similar appearing configurations
that could add to the confusion.
The other thing is, assuming you can see the stars at all from space
(hee hee), then I hear tell they are actually clearer and brighter.
Having set the cube-Page to 10 parsecs across helps by equating
Absolute magnitude to Apparent magnitude a 1 Page distance.
So without getting lost in an interesting aside I just note that my
method of using bright stars as guideposts to "find" constellations
could get pretty confusing pretty quick.
Jump past a little dust and you might loose the breadcrumb trail altogether.
A couple of degree seconds off is a really big miss across parsecs.
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