Matt Black said:(Pulsars wouldn't be useful because you have to be aligned with their axial jets to see them. From any other point in the galaxy, chances are you won't see the ones that we can see from earth.)
Matt Black said:(Pulsars wouldn't be useful because you have to be aligned with their axial jets to see them. From any other point in the galaxy, chances are you won't see the ones that we can see from earth.)
You couldn't rely on things like quasars, which only have life-spans of 10 million years or so.
FoxWander said:Also, putting them at M4 or one of the clusters Pbartender mentioned that are just above the galactic disc would be both immediately shocking (in terms of "we're not in Kansas anymore" effect) and probably more than a little terrifying! Just imagine it- you look out your spaceship porthole and see thousands/millions of stars 'below' you and 'above' you, something completely different. Mostly blackness but spotted with a multitude of bright points. And then you realize that each of them is a galaxy itself! Check out the Hubble Deep Field image to get an idea what it would look like. Wonderous and terrifying at the same time, I would think.
Pbartender said:What they see would probably look a lot like this...
http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/space/galaxy/galaxy_13.jpg
...except it would be a little bit more flattened. And it would fill half the sky.
Umbran said:The current estimates for net quasar lifespans generally lie between one million and 100 million years. While 10 million lies in the middle of that range, in terms of order of magnitude, the wide margin of error there means they may still be useful. In this case, failure to see them can give you useful information - it tells you are outside a certain volume of space, and that helps you figure out what else you might look for...
Umbran said:After a bit of thought, though, I've realized that most of this is moot - in a sense, where you are in realspace relative to Earth is unimportant unless you travel through normal space to get there. If you're using wormhole or other dimensional travel, what matters is the distance through that other dimension that matters. Depending on your travel methods, it could be easier and quicker to get to the galactic core than to get to Alpha Centauri.
Matt Black said:So a full-blown radio quasar observed from Earth might be a piddling emission line galaxy when observed from another angle/time.
Except that, regardless of how you travel between two points, light still has to take the realspace route. If you were to teleport to the Virgo cluster, you would be seeing a universe that was 50 million years older in one direction, and 50 million younger in the other direction.
BiggusGeekus said:Are those galaxies or stars I'm looking at there?
BiggusGeekus said:(I mean, aside from the Miky Way)