Star hidden on the Gal Map?

[Saool]

This is an image from the Gal Map. It is taken from the point of view of the NGC 2682 YBP 364 system.

Bookmarked are two systems higher up out of the Galaxy: HD 74926 and HD76133. There are four other points of light. These are on the Gal Map background sky box, so must be other galaxies.

Now here is the same view, taken with the external cam, from just over 2 million light seconds up from the two stars in the YBP 364 system.

There appears to be an additional star. I cannot find it anywhere on the map and there is nothing in the back ground sky box that I can correlate with it. It is also not another dissent body in the YBP 364 system as this image shows.

So what am I missing? What is going on here?

 

[WR3ND]

Not all stars are shown on the galaxy map. I think the default is a 6,000 star count limit. This is likely done for optimization concerns.

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the specific situation you noted or not though.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

Can you get a bearing on it from another angle? ie. from another nearby star?

 

[Saool]

I can...

These images as taken from HD 74926, after using a J3 boost.

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And then from HD 76133 (and another J3 jump) you can still see it, and I still cannot account for in it the Gal Map.


HD 76133 is the end point for Distant Stars (this Sunday).


EDIT: you can also find HD 75406 and HIP 42635 within 500ly, amd there is a bright background galaxy in that direction, but none of them correspond with 'Star X'.

 

[Saool]

This is a close as I can get.

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[dynamicbob]

Saool goto the galactic map and type in PSR. Youll notice something unique could it be one of those systems notice how far out they are (thargoid cluster ?)

 

[marx]

Interesting. This reminds me of the time when the Ovomly sector was bugged: you couldn't see its stars on the galaxy map. If you searched for them by name, however, it would center on them, so the stars did exist. I don't know if anybody flew out to them at the time, but even so they couldn't have entered the systems, as they were permit locked at the time. Later on, the sector was fixed and the lock removed.

But back to this hidden star. I tried to come up with what might be its name and look it up on the galaxy map, but I failed to find anything. However, it looks interesting how there are no stars in the vicinity of the non-proc. gen. star cluster: this is just my opinion, but I think there should be at least a few, judging by the region it's in. If so, then there might be some bugs here with the Stellar Forge, probably due to so many NPG stars being in such a sparse region. Suppression might work too well there. This is just speculation though.
I think you should ask Jackie Silver about this, he has a much better understanding of this than I do. Also, I'd recommend putting in a bug report, just to be sure.

 

[Sapyx]

It is possible for stars to be visible on the skybox, but not visible on the galaxy map. There are three of them within 1 LY of Sol; these are "test systems" put there by FD. You can read about them in this thread.

 

[dynamicbob]

Saool goto the galactic map and type in PSR. Youll notice something unique could it be one of those systems notice how far out they are (thargoid cluster ?)

The strange thing about psr is the map will goto them but it wont hold over them theres from what i can see of the split second appearence is a cluster of 10-20 systems

 

[Jackie Silver]

I'm not sure about this specific star, although I do remember that there are (were?) "test" systems next to Sol which appear in-game but not on the galmap - this doesn't look like one of those though.

About the pulsars, I believe there are a number of pulsars whose coordinates are outside the bounds of the galmap (roughly +/- 10,000 ly from the plane) - when the map tries to draw them, it can't place them in their "proper" position so it moves them to a spot about 10,000 ly above or below the plane. If you search for one (just typing PSR into the map will hit some right away) you may briefly see the star before the map zooms around to the adjusted position where nothing is visible. Odd stuff.
I went round all the pulsars (that I could find) recently for my map - if you download that there's a pulsars.csv file in there which has the raw data. There are several of these "invisible clusters". In any case, I think that's a separate issue.

Don't think it would be a suppression thing either, at first glance it looks to be on the edge of the 'corridor' but I wouldn't think it would have the effect of making invisible stars like that.

 

[Mengy]

I've experienced this in the past too, both at the top of the galaxy and the bottom. I could see stars out in the distance from the ship which I could not find browsing the galaxy map. Sometimes though I can see them in the galaxy map while moving the map, but they would vanish when I stopped panning the map! I could even get the system name while panning, so I'd type the name into the nav field of the galaxy map and the targeted system would pan to the star BUT as soon as the map stopped moving the system would disappear, even though I had it selected!

I don't know why it happens, but some far out stars way above or below the galactic plane just seem to have buggy display issues in the galaxy map.

Forever unreachable, stubborn, tricksy little stars....

 

[CDR Michael Darkmoor]

Could this be the return of "Parallax" as a tool?
I you have 3 points that are known and their positions with regard to each other... you should be able to determine if that "star" is actually still in the galaxy or not.

 

[Qohen Leth]

You may try to add more stars in your skybox/GalMap by using the tweak explained here.

From what I can tell, it's not just an absolute number limit (or this system would theoretically show up), but rather something related to the density of the visible 'bubble' of stars, itself relative to the zoom. Given a zoom z and a density d, there could be a few cases in which you actually have x stars around, but the output of z*d or something will make it so the map will only show x-1 or x-2.

I dunno

 

[marx]

Could this be the return of "Parallax" as a tool?
I you have 3 points that are known and their positions with regard to each other... you should be able to determine if that "star" is actually still in the galaxy or not.

Oh, good idea! We have quite precise coordinates for systems, so it should be feasible to approximate a position for the invisible star well enough to determine what region it might be in. I won't be going there to do this myself, but since there are so many Commanders out there now, perhaps somebody could help with doing some measurements before they blow their ships up?

 

[Eahlstan]

I know this is necromancy, but has anyone ever found out which star this is?

 

[Saool]

I know this is necromancy, but has anyone ever found out which star this is?

Not that I know of. I keep considering taking a trip back up there to have another look.

 

[Orvidius]

I guess we're re-necroing this?

During the "Glorious HIPs" project, I ran into several HIP/HD catalog stars that were so far removed from the plane, that they were unselectable, and the cursor couldn't be moved anywhere near them. Searching for them by name would initially take the cursor to it, and then it would instantly pop back down to the allowed range above/below the plane. Some of these were maybe 15 kly "up", for instance.

If it's one of those, parallax should show that it's pretty far away.