Help locating places on the galaxy map

Suteksio

Suteksio
Hi all, I'm having problems locating on the galaxy map things I see from the cockpit of my ship, like nebulas, star clusters, etc. Nebulas are usually easy as they are on the galaxy map but I'm struggling to pinpoint certain areas of space. I was on my way to Elephant Trunk nebula and saw a very interesting cluster of bright stars on my way there, but couldn't figure out how to locate it on the map.

Any tips from the pro explorers? It would be really nice to have some kind of HUD tool to help us locate that kind of stuff.

Thanks in advance!
 

Jackie Silver

Jackie Silver
Suteksio said:
Any tips from the pro explorers? It would be really nice to have some kind of HUD tool to help us locate that kind of stuff.
Click to expand...

An interesting idea. And do-able, but one of my New Year's resolutions is "don't overcommit"... :D - it does fit with something I'm already doing but I will need to finish the rest of it first.

In the meantime - my standard procedure is to point at the Milky Way, orient it so that the Magellanic Clouds are "down" below the plane. Use this to work out the general direction of the object you're interested in (alternatively target nearby stars in the navpanel until you seen one that is in the similar direction) and then follow that direction on the galmap; bit hit and miss for long distance objects though, so a better tool would be useful. Using an online map of the galaxy that has nebulae on it can help a lot, there are various versions like this one.

(eta) I would guess the one you're seeing is S171 a.k.a. NGC 7822.
 
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Suteksio

Suteksio
Thanks for the tips Jackie Silver, very useful. Now it sounds very stupid but I never thought of using the nav panel to select a star in the general direction, I usually tried to find it using a big reference object like a nebula.

And of course it's NGC 7822 what I was looking for.

Thank you!
 
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iain666

iain666
Suteksio said:
And of course it's NGC 7822 what I was looking for.
Click to expand...

It's always NGC 7822 :D

Another way I do it is to point your ship at the object of interest and then select all the systems in the left hand panel and when you find which ones are closest to the right direction then, while one of them is targeted, go into the gal map and you have a line to follow towards the thing.

You can also select other systems at any range and get the target icon in the HUD so when you think you've found it you can select that system in the gal map and then go back to your cockpit and see if there's a ring drawn round the right thing in the sky box.
 
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