In Memoriam Star

JosefK

JosefK
This past Saturday I made the decision to let my 21 year old feline friend move on to her next big adventure. Her health was quickly declining and it was the right time.

Some years ago, a sibling had a star “named” for each of his sons as they were born. While I know that star naming websites are just fluff, I thought maybe I could find a star for my departed cat. And then find that star in ED and buy an ALT login with her name and then go be the first to discover that system and then her name would be in ED for years to come as a memorial.

I started with some googling and found some useful tools.

Simbad and MAST both allow you to search using multiple collections and provide identifiers. Learning what I now know about ED (that approx. 160,000 stars were actually mapped, the rest of the 400 billion are procgen by Stellar Forge) one question is are those 160,000 probably already tagged by first discovery?

The Online Star Register seems to give you the coordinates of the star before you purchase.
https://osr.org/order/en/giftpack?currency_id=1&occasion_id=17

I’ve looked up a few of these as a test and can locate them both on Simbad and MAST.

Then I found this on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/3fsr11/where_does_frontier_get_its_star_data_from/
Basically giving the idea that ED used various catalogues to place those 160,000 non-procgen stars.

So over the next few days I’m going to try to determine if there are any of those “real” stars untagged in the game. On the galmap I would assume if I can buy carto data on it, its been first discovered already.

Any input you’d have on how to go about this or other ideas would be much appreciated!


Fly safe out there!
 

Arry

Arry
I lost a good mate of mine, a couple of weeks ago. So being someone who grows trees from seed; I found an Oak tree about 5 years old and so I planted it; to mark the spot.
 
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Allitnil

Allitnil
Sorry for your loss, but 21 years is a really good age. None of our ship cats have made it past 17 :(

JosefK said:
So over the next few days I’m going to try to determine if there are any of those “real” stars untagged in the game. On the galmap I would assume if I can buy carto data on it, its been first discovered already.
Click to expand...
It's not something I've ever done, but I think that you can only buy carto data for quite close systems (20 LY?). If so, that would be a very unreliable indicator. EDSM might be a better bet - if it's on there then you can safely assume it has been tagged. But even that is a very long way from complete. Indeed, I'm afraid that it is safer to assume that if a real-life system is in ED then it has already been discovered than the opposite. Several CMDRs are explicitly trying to visit all of the real-life systems. That's not to say that there aren't still a good number of them undiscovered, just that most of those that are either at all obvious or near the bubble have already been visited.

On a practical note, with the post 3.3 mechanics, you are almost always going to auto-tag the primary star if you should visit the system with your main CMDR just to see if it is untagged, so don't do that! So buy the alt account, do whatever you need to do to get a semi-decent ship (really shouldn't take more than a few hours) and visit as many real-life systems as you can that aren't in EDSM. Might take some time but you should get there eventually.

Good luck and I hope you find a fitting memorial.
 

JosefK

JosefK
Thanks to both of you for the advice. And I was planning on doing this all with the ALT login. But good catch!
I will post back here if I find a way to get this done!
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
Have a read of this thread, about finding real-world "bought stars" in ED. The star the OP in that thread was looking for was not in ED, nor even listed in any star catalogue.

The answer to the question, "Is a star purchased at random from a star registry company going to be findable in ED?" is, "Almost certainly not". ED has about 100,000 real-world stars in its database, which sounds like a lot but this is only a small fraction of the several million stars that are catalogued in all of the star catalogues that have ever been published. Furthermore, the sky-photos that the "star registry companies" use are typically deep-field photos, and the stars they pick out are often un-researched - they aren't in any of the real-world star catalogues, and no information is known about them other than that spot of light on that photo.

A current project to vastly increase the number of detectable stars that are in catalogues, using a space telescope called "Gaia" specially made and launched for that purpose, is currently in progress and scheduled to be completed in 2022. It will increase the number of real-world-catalogued stars from "several million" to "over a billion". Most of the stars used by the star registry companies probably will turn up in the Gaia catalogue.

Finally, if you do get lucky enough to find a purchasable star that's on the ED starmap, chances are it will have already been discovered. Most of those 100,000 real-world stars are either (a) in the Bubble, (b) within 1000 LYs of Sol, or (c) in or near a prominent nebula or star-cluster.
 

Orvidius

Orvidius
JosefK said:
And I was planning on doing this all with the ALT login. But good catch!
Click to expand...

Awesome! BTW, when starting an alt, there are a few ways to quickly jump-start yourself, by dropping meta-alloys or something else valuable onto your new alt account.

Are you playing on PC? That makes it easy, since you can run the game twice. It'll complain that the launcher can't run twice, so just close the first one, since the launcher doesn't technically need to keep running while playing.
 

JosefK

JosefK
Orvidius said:
Awesome! BTW, when starting an alt, there are a few ways to quickly jump-start yourself, by dropping meta-alloys or something else valuable onto your new alt account.

Are you playing on PC? That makes it easy, since you can run the game twice. It'll complain that the launcher can't run twice, so just close the first one, since the launcher doesn't technically need to keep running while playing.
Click to expand...

I've gotten one ALT running with my main CMDR by running one on Steam and the other not from Steam. Good tip on the meta alloy drop though, thanks sir!
 
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