Constellations

Old Duck

Old Duck
So is it possible to see the constellations in space? I'm new, so I don't have a Sol permit yet. Instead I'm at Barnard's Star, figuring that's close enough to Sol to make out at least some Earth-seen constellations. When I look up in my own sky (IRL), I can easily make out the more obvious constellations like the dippers, Cassiopeia, etc. When I look at the stars in ED, nothing stands out the same way.

I actually tried to focus on Polaris to get my bearings, but of course that is permit-locked as well (I need to buy a hacked FSD from the black market). So I grabbed the star next to it. Pointing my ship in that direction, I did not see the Little Dipper.. I might have seen the Big Dipper, but I also see whales and elephants in the clouds, so who knows.

If ED's galaxy is a true rendering of our own, then the constellations should stand out. My only assumption is perhaps more stars are bright in in the vacuum of space, thus crowding out the ones that normally catch our eye at night. Either that or something is broken?
 

CenturionPuch

CenturionPuch
They are there but hard to pick them out as you can see lot more stars in ED than on the sky normally, and the brightness of them isn't the same as in the real sky. As far as I noticed same class stars have the same brightness but I could be wrong about it.
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Old Duck said:
So is it possible to see the constellations in space? I'm new, so I don't have a Sol permit yet. Instead I'm at Barnard's Star, figuring that's close enough to Sol to make out at least some Earth-seen constellations. When I look up in my own sky (IRL), I can easily make out the more obvious constellations like the dippers, Cassiopeia, etc. When I look at the stars in ED, nothing stands out the same way.

I actually tried to focus on Polaris to get my bearings, but of course that is permit-locked as well (I need to buy a hacked FSD from the black market). So I grabbed the star next to it. Pointing my ship in that direction, I did not see the Little Dipper.. I might have seen the Big Dipper, but I also see whales and elephants in the clouds, so who knows.

If ED's galaxy is a true rendering of our own, then the constellations should stand out. My only assumption is perhaps more stars are bright in in the vacuum of space, thus crowding out the ones that normally catch our eye at night. Either that or something is broken?
Click to expand...

Yes. They cheated, so they are the constellations we see on earth now, not future constellations. :) And as you move about different systems, they change.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
FD have tried, really really hard, to make the ED skybox as seen from Sol system as realistic as possible compared to what you see at night from 21st century Earth, while at the same time making the stars be at roughly the correct distances from Sol. Many of the other odd effects you can see in game - like the giant 128-LY-wide cubes of B-class stars - are only visible as a result of the apparent-magnitude equations that are in the game to make stars like Achenar visible from Sol. Their simulation is pretty good - but it's not perfect. There are some odd effects - missing stars, stars that are present but "shouldn't be".

For example, there are some procedurally-generated star systems that are close enough to Sol that, if they were real stars, they'd be naked-eye visible. Duamta is the standout example: an F9-class star just 10 LYs away from Sol, it would be a bright yellow-white beacon in the night sky, and a star that would feature prominently in 20th century sci-fi stories as being "the nearest Sun-like star to Earth" (Alpha Centauri is a double/triple star system, so doesn't really count). It's closer than Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and other more famous "nearby sun-like stars". Duamta can actually be seen in the screenshot of the Leo-Ursa Major region in the other thread linked to by Red Anders above; I hope AkenBosch doesn't mind me borrowing and altering his pic, for educational purposes.

kddTapC.jpg

Io3cJRi.jpg


If Duamta existed in real life, then the constellation Leo would have a bright giant horn on it's head; the ancients probably would have called it a unicorn, rather than a lion.

Another example. There are three anomalous "dark system" stars right up next to Sol, less than 1 LY away. You can see them in the skybox from neighbouring systems, but you can't see them on the galaxy map. They're "dark systems", which FD originally programmed onto the starmap for testing purposes; they've covered them up on the galaxy map but never actually deleted them. One of them is apparently called "Singlelighttest" and is inhabited; it used to feature prominently in the commodity trade data for Sol and other nearby systems (here's an old Beta bug report where you can see it), until FD fixed that bug back in 1.4; I remember seeing it when I first started playing in 1.3.

You can see discussion and screenshots of Sol's "dark system" neighbours and the old location of the invisible Singlelighttest system in this thread.
 
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