Astronomy questions (edit: questions answered Thanks guys!)

[WayneLigon]

How hard would it be to find your location in this galaxy? How hard would it be to find your location in another galaxy?

Fairly easy within this galaxy. You find a couple of the comparatively rare supergiant stars such as Rigel and you can swiftly narrow down where you are.

In another galaxy? That depends on how far away you are from this one. Unless you get lucky, you could search for the rest of your lifetime and never find the milky way, even after eliminating all the galaxy types that are not like ours. It could be concealed behind a curtain of gas or dust. You could conceivably drop into a galaxy where the light from ours has not yet reached it (age of our galaxy, roughly 12 billion; age of universe, roughly 13.7 billion); the Milky Way would be invisible to it.

If you could afford it, this would make a hell of a game aid for such a campaign. Each point in that crystal is a galaxy, not a star...

 

[Delta]

How hard would it be to find your location in this galaxy? How hard would it be to find your location in another galaxy?

I'll chime in as other have. Inside our galaxy: pretty easy. Find some stuff outside galaxy to use as reference points. Use some trigonometry.

Outside our galaxy, it gets harder, but one question is "How far outside do you mean"? There are other structures recognized at scales bigger than a galaxy. Check out this site for an excellent view:

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/

Inside "Local Group" of galaxies: still pretty easy.
Inside "Virgo Supercluster": a bit harder.
Outside "Virgo Supercluster": now you're probably getting lost.

 

[sckeener]

kidding

look for the arrow and there you are
The Arrow

 

[BiggusGeekus]

OK, thanks for all the answers!

A new question: I'm looking fora nice, firiendly G2 star that's at least 5,000 light years but not more than 15,000 light years from Earth? The distances aren't that important, but for story purposes a good 10,000 light years away would be nice. Under 1,000 would be pretty bad.

If you need detail, I'm blogging (and who isn't?) about it here: http://www.circvsmaximvs.com/diarium/?q=blog/275

... of course everything is in reverse order. :\

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Anything more accurate would be useless because you would still need to do a complete local map of the area since the stars would have moved somewhat over the course of the years it would have taken for the light to reach the original destination where you first observed them (before the wormhole).

Excellent point! The astromoners would know about that, but yeah, there'd have to be a lot of calculations to figure it all out anew, assuming they previously had good information about the current neighborhood to begin with.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If you've got telescopes like Hubble, no. Hubble can quite clearly make out other nearby galaxies, and we can get a pretty good idea of relative position that way.

The difference of angles (the term has escaped my undercaffinated brain at the moment, sorry) from one side of the galactic disk to the other isn't that dramatic, though. I think it would have a big margin of error, almost to the point of being worthless beyond saying "yep, we're in the Milky Way, but a long way from home."

 

[Pbartender]

The difference of angles (the term has escaped my undercaffinated brain at the moment, sorry) from one side of the galactic disk to the other isn't that dramatic, though.

Parallax.

 

[Pbartender]

OK, thanks for all the answers!

A new question: I'm looking fora nice, firiendly G2 star that's at least 5,000 light years but not more than 15,000 light years from Earth? The distances aren't that important, but for story purposes a good 10,000 light years away would be nice. Under 1,000 would be pretty bad.

Shoot... I used to have bookmarks to several websites that might have had something like this. Let me see if I can find something.

On the other hand... Your typical friendly G2 star likely won't be visible from 5,000 - 15,000 light years away. Plus, in a volume that size, their will innumerable friendly G2 stars floating about. You can always make one up, if you'd like, with the excuse that from earth, the star lies behind a nebula or dust could and is unviewable.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

On the other hand... Your typical friendly G2 star likely won't be visible from 5,000 - 15,000 light years away. Plus, in a volume that size, their will innumerable friendly G2 stars floating about. You can always make one up, if you'd like, with the excuse that from earth, the star lies behind a nebula or dust could and is unviewable.

Really? Great. I'll just say it wasn't in the Earth database and call it quits.

 

[Pbartender]

Really? Great. I'll just say it wasn't in the Earth database and call it quits.

Right.

Another option would be to pick a globular cluster. There's dozens of them floating about 5,000 - 15,000 light years away from earth either just above or just below the disk of the galaxy. Also makes it interesting to calulate location, since from that vantage point, you might be able to see the Milky Way galaxy itself as a huge flattened spiral. It'd be plainly and painfully obvious to the players at first glance that they are along way from home.

Globular Clusters of the Milky Way. The "R_Sun" column lists the distance of the cluster from the sun in thousands of light years. The links on the left-hand side provide more information on specific clusters.

M4 in the constellation Scorpius is the closest at 7,200 l-y.