What's in the centre of the Pilots Federation's galaxy?

Saool

Saool
Ever since the galactic regions came in i have been vexed by the fact that the centre of the 'map' is not Sagittarius A*. If you look at where the spoke lines of the map converge, it is a good 500Ly off. I wonder if there is a reason for this? What is at the centre of the map?

I took a screen shot of the map and tried to pinpoint the centre. The issue is resolution. The lines fade out as you zoom in, so there is a reasonable margin for error. As you can see on the doctored image below, my lines do not perfectly converge. The second issue is 'height'. Getting the central plane of the galaxy is also rather hard.

The means your margin for error might be 100Ly or more on any axis, and this is of course the most star dense area of the galaxy.

What do you think? Has anyone looked at this before? Is it worth going to try and find the centre (I am at Explorer's Anchorage now, so it is tempting).

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Zieman

Zieman
You never know until you go there.
I'd say it's worth it for the journey alone, a reason to go somewhere specific, even if it turns out there's nothing interesting there.
 

Saool

Saool
Well I have found a nice ringed water world with four moons. But I think I am still a little off the middle.

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iLVjavL.png
 

Saool

Saool
JUENAE CL-Y G3 seems pretty close. It is visible on the Gal Map as a star with its own smudgy halo. It is a T-Tauri proto star.

I got a little more interested when seeing a smudge in space two jumps out. At one jump it was clear it was from this star.

Sadly it is an unremarkable system with a single previously discovered and mapped ice world.

InK4pX8.png


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4G7Xi8a.png

Of course this smudgy patch might be normal for these sorts of stars and I just never noticed. But it is visually where I would put the centre, looking on the map.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Nice thinking.

There's a more reliable way to pinpoint the centre than drawing lines on a screenshot - jump up to one side of the line at y=0, then jump either side of it marking the x/z coordinates of systems as you go. After moving along the line for a few hundred LY it should be possible to get a pretty decent numerical projection of it.
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Using the Codex version of the map, which should solve some of the alignment issues with the galaxy one, it looks like the red, orange and purple lines intersect pretty well, with the blue and green lines being a little off (and their own intersection isn't quite on the purple line)
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
Just FYI: Sagittarius A* is not in the exact centre of the Milky way. It's a little off to one side. Even though it's the single heaviest object in the galaxy, at 4 million solar masses, it is still far, far outweighed by the rest of the galactic bulge; there's no particular force holding it in place at the centre. Not to mention that it's actually really hard to figure out where the precise centre of a galaxy is, given that it has an asymmetric shape with very fuzzy edges.

So, given the ambiguity, we could unilaterally declare Sag A* to simply be the centre of the galaxy, and define "Galactic North" to be in the direction of Sag A*. But this has not happened in ED. In the ED galaxy, Sag A*'s co-ordinates are +25.2 | -20.9 | 25900.00 - if "Galactic North" were defined as "pointing directly at Sag A*", then if Sag A were exactly in the Galactic centre its co-ordinates would be something like 0 | -38 | 25900 (assuming the Brown Dwarf Disc is supposed to sit in the exact centre of the galactic disc, the Y co-ordinate of the galactic centre should be slightly negative, because Sol isn't quite exactly on the galactic equator). So Sag A* is 25 light-years to the "east" and about 18 LYs "Up" from where the co-ordinate-creators thought the galactic centre was.

So "Galactic North" must be defined by some other parameter - presumably a geometric centre of the galaxy, worked out by the boffins in Universal Cartographics at some time in ED's past.
 
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