A very cool picture of our Solar Neighborhood. See this and a bunch more at The Neighborhood.
The collection isn’t complete; it focuses on relatively bright stars and those associated with known exoplanets. A slightly more realistic representation would have a lot more small, dim, red stars. Still, I like it.
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Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
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September 2nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
They need to update Fomalhaut with an asterisk.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Very nice…thanks!
September 2nd, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Reality – WTF?
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
This is a very clear method of displaying 3D data in a 2D format.
I had not seen it done this way before.
Very impressive.
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:45 pm
the plane is the galactic plane?
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:20 am
Anyone else a fan of the game Frontier
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:23 am
Quoting http://www.deepfly.org/TheNeighborhood/6-NeighborhoodSphere.html
“The radius of the inner ring is 13 light years (4 parsecs); each successive ring represents an additional 13 light years. Numbers at the perimeter represent approximate right ascension, measured in hours. Asterisks indicate exoplanetary systems.”
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:27 am
You can also use Celestia (free & open-source) to get a much more cooler image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia
September 3rd, 2009 at 1:53 am
Ahhh, Elite II: Frontier. Good times, annoying bugs…
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:55 am
[...] Cosmic Variance, and Deepfly.org, some nice maps of the Solar Neighborhood, with some main (bright) stars and [...]
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:47 am
To Michael (#4)
The technique used here is used extensively in drawings by Guy Ottewell in his awesome “Astronomical Companion” and the annual “Astronomical Calendar”. (For those of us Luddites who learned our night sky in the pre-PC days.
Dave
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 am
Of course if we let those Andromedaians move into our neighborhood….
September 25th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Very nice, but you really need to know which exoplanets are Goldilocks planets. I mean we’re finding these exoplanets with the hope of finding life when we go there; that rules out giants like Jupiter. So if some Magician of Time lands in his starship (there is no such thing as a faster than speed of light starship), we’d like to know which planet we might choose to immigrate to. Of course with general relativity time dilation, we don’t need faster that light travel to get there still young; but we still use biological deep hibernation and rejuvenation; as well as we quite a bit of cosmic ray shielding for starship safety. Well that’s the principle, and it’s already done. Of course the very existence of The Magician of Time is TOP SECRET. Local Earth politics like other planetary politics is very silly.