Star designation

[bobopet2]

Hello,
I would like to be able to find real stars in the game using their AGASC ID or their real life co-ordinates taken from the night sky. For that I need to know what system you use to name the stars in the game or if there is any search method available. It would be nice if the search bar in the in-game galaxy map accepts co-ordinates from Earth's night sky or AGASC ID. The star I am specifically looking for is: Star RA 5h 58m 41.5s ; Star Decl +3*24'53.0" ; AGASC ID 15867680 .
Thank you to anyone who can help!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Stars taken from real catalogues are in-game and are searchable by their catalogue designations - but not every existing catalogue was used (and of course more stars have been catalogued since).

So you can search in the galmap for example for "HIP 2021" and it will take you to that catalogue star (common name: Beta Hydri)

The AGASC catalogue doesn't give a distance, as far as I can tell, so RA+Dec provide a direction from Sol but that's all. And the AGASC star itself won't be in the game - but it should be possible to find a procedurally generated star that roughly matches it.

EDIT: those RA and Dec would be galactic spherical coordinates 203.76 Long, -10.11 Lat
Converting to cartesian coordinates that would be a ratio of -0.901Z 0.397X -0.176Y in the cartesian coordinate system used by Elite Dangerous.

There's no hint of distance in the catalogue, but at apparent magnitude +14 it's going to be a fair way away. Let's say it's an 8th absolute magnitude M-class star (which most of these obscure catalogue ones will be) and that gives a distance of about 540 LY.

That gives approximate Elite Dangerous coordinates -487Z, 214X, -95Y ... there's no star exactly there, but the distance is very approximate (and, anyway, there's going to be 1300 years of proper motion to contend with), so moving along that line a bit something like Synuefe VH-T b23-3 is probably pretty close to the star you're after. Pick a different M-class near that one if you like, though.