[Trek/Bablyon 5/Aliens/DC Comics/Asimov/BSG/Dune] Planet Locations

Morrus

Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
This is likely of extremely limited interest, but some folks might enjoy it. I have - for various reasons - been figuring out the location in real astronomy terms of various sci-fi planets. Lots of them can be located with a little research, or by reading wikipedia, guides, and commentaries. For example, Vulcan has been said to be at 40-Eridani for a long time. The location of Bablyon 5 (shared with Star Trek's Axanar, amusingly) is also fairly well established.

Here's what I've found so far. Distances in parsecs rather than light years.

Location Parsecs -- System

Andor (Star Trek) 3.51 -- Procyon

Archeron (LV-426) (Aliens)* 12 -- Zeta2 Reticuli

Arrakis (Dune) 100 -- Alpha Carinae (Canopus)

Axanar (Star Trek) 3.2 -- Epsilon Eridani

Babel (Star Trek) 4.39 -- Wolf 424

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 3.2 -- Epsilon Eridani

Centauri Prime (Bablylon 5) 8.6 -- Zeta Tucane

Ceti Alpha V & VI (Star Trek) 76 -- Alpha Ceti

Farpoint Station (Star Trek) 830 -- Alpha Cygni (Deneb)

Kronos/Qo'noS (Star Trek) 34.4 -- Omega Leonis (K'thar)

Krypton (DC Comics, original) 780,000 -- Andromeda Galaxy

Krypton (DC Comics, current) 8.3 -- LHS 2520 (Rao)

Minbar (Babylon 5) 8.0 -- Chi Draconis

Orion (Star Trek) 8.0 -- Pi3 Orionis (Orion)

Risa (Star Trek) 27 Epsilon Ceti

Romulus & Remus (Star Trek) 20 -- 128-Trianguli

Tellar Prime 3.5 -- 61 Cygni

Trantor (Foundation) 8,000 -- Galactic central region

Twelve Colonies (BSG) 613 -- Cyrannus star cluster

Vulcan (Star Trek) 4.9 -- 40-Eridani
 

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Huh; the B5 locations are awfully close. So many worlds of galactic importance in a tiny space.

In your research, have you found any easy to use database of nearby stars? Say, anything within 1000 light years. I've thought it would be interesting to figure out a "migration pattern" based on actual star locations, and working in some made up rules for how fast and how far folks could go.

Many astronomical databases have placement on a sphere, and either no estimate of the distance, or very coarse estimates, or are expensive, or are just hard to use.

The other data which I've always wondered about is how dense are stars, at least, within 1000 ly. I'm supposing the answer will have to include some distribution (e.g., brown dwarfs vs systems with more than one star).

There is this, which is very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble

And, if interstellar gas densities are important, the 300ly bubbles become very important and can be used as a feature of interstellar exploration stories.

If you can ever find it, the game "Star Gate" had a correct (for the time) placement of stars out to about 30 ly, with very interesting, but complex, rules for movement in 3D by (essentially) teleporting across light years. One of the points of the game was how conflict changes when (1) random encounters except at cites of interest would never happen and (2) no meaningful defensive boundaries can be made.

Thx!

TomB
 

tomBitonti said:
Huh; the B5 locations are awfully close. So many worlds of galactic importance in a tiny space.
Click to expand...

I was surprised, too.

In your research, have you found any easy to use database of nearby stars? Say, anything within 1000 light years. I've thought it would be interesting to figure out a "migration pattern" based on actual star locations, and working in some made up rules for how fast and how far folks could go.
Click to expand...

There are loads of resources, but very little I'd call easy to use. I find it odd that elegant looking star maps like that don't exist. I'm having to do it all from scratch, pretty much, cobbling together info from various resources.

Fictional space - now there's tons out there, all gorgeous and high quality. The real stuff, though, is less so.

I have had to devise a coordinate system of my own for the galaxy (30 x 30 regions of 1000 parsecs across; each with 10 x 10 sector blocks of 100 parsecs; each with 10 x 10 sectors of 10 parsecs). Actual astronomical coordinate systems are not at all useful for casual use.

The reason I'm doing this is - ignoring the fun diversion into Trek and B5 etc., - I need high quality, easy to use navigational maps for my game, so I'm having actually commission them from scratch.
 



Umbran said:
There are about a million stars within a 1000 light year radius of Sol.

There are about 260,000 stars within 250 light years of Earth.

There are 33 stars within 12.5 light years of Earth.

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/index.html

So, you have an issue of *scale*.
Click to expand...

Yeah you have to be picky. At 1000 ly scale, you're talking clusters, pulsars, nebulae, and a curated selection of 'important' stars.

One option is to just go with stars with actual names. That cuts the number right down! Leaves out most of those on that list though.

I'm having to do four scales - galaxy, 1000 parsec, 100 parsec, 10 parsec. And even at the lowest one, I'm being choosy about what I include. At the top scale, we're just talking major structural elements.
 
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