Stars Constellations

serkelion

S
Hi everybody,

The main reason I ranked up the Fed was to get a Sol Permit, since I wanted to see how ED was rendering the constellations we see from our planet. Here there are the results.

Finding Ursa major and Ursa minor has been straightforward

tW9npbX.jpg


I checked also the small stars (low magnitude) using Stellarium, and everything works perfect. Wonderful work!

On the opposite, finding the summer triangle (Altair, Deneb, Vega) has been a bit more challenging:

n3P6aTj.jpg


This because, as you can see, 37 Cygnus, which should be Gamma Cygnus (the cross-center star of the Cygnus constellation) is not rendered correctly, therefore I took almost 10 minutes to correctly identify the Cygnus constellation.

This star should have magnitude 2.2 (from Earth's surface), more or less comparable with Delta and Epsilon, but it's not.

Any idea why? Just a little bug, or maybe is there a valid explanation?
 

Berpol

B
Perhaps a stupid idea, but have you visited the star or checked its stats in EDDB?
Perhaps they changed the star (though 1000 years are not a long time).

I thought about doing a birth sign tour and while checking noticed some (small) changes, like Spica's distance ist 262 in Wikipedia and 249.71 in EDDB.
 

Jackie Silver

Jackie Silver
Berpol said:
I thought about doing a birth sign tour and while checking noticed some (small) changes, like Spica's distance ist 262 in Wikipedia and 249.71 in EDDB.
Click to expand...

We generally do not know the distances of stars that accurately, so treat any "distances" given on Wikipedia as highly suspect. It is hard to measure the distance to a star.

(The same goes for lists of "the biggest stars." Generally speaking we get the direction of the star, and we get its spectrum and brightness, and make a chain of estimates based on those. Parallax measurements (e.g. HIPPARCOS and now GAIA) help narrow down the distance but there are still uncertainties.)
 
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Old Duck

Old Duck
Yeah the stars in ED don't look like the stars in our own night sky. I think this has to do with ED's "amplification" of the sky. Orion is impossible for me to miss when I go outside on a cold winter night, but one really needs to "focus" in ED to see it. On the other hand, Barnard's loop and all the other nebula are bright and colorful in ED whereas they are barely made out with the naked eye IRL. Orion is there in ED, I can find it easily now, but it's definitive "shape" is lost in the unrealistic representations of luminosity in ED's skybox..
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
Most visible-to-the-eye stars are present in the skybox of Sol system, and their brightnesses are such that they are rendered properly in ED. Even for the faint, obscure constellations. With tens of thousands of stars, there are of course going to be a few glitches - "missing" stars, and "extra" stars. But overall, they've done a remarkably good job.

In the process of "looking for UY Scuti" or suitable substitute thereof, I was comparing how the Scutum constellation - which is not one of the big, bright, famous ones - showed in ED compared to the Wikipedia starmap of the constellation. I had to select Alpha Scuti from the galaxy map in order to find the constellation from Sol.

It came out pretty good. Here's that part of the sky, using the external camera at maximum zoom:

oxb4anW.png


And here's how it compares to the Wikipedia starmap:

ZzRUGo4.jpg
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
Old Duck said:
Yeah the stars in ED don't look like the stars in our own night sky. I think this has to do with ED's "amplification" of the sky. Orion is impossible for me to miss when I go outside on a cold winter night, but one really needs to "focus" in ED to see it. On the other hand, Barnard's loop and all the other nebula are bright and colorful in ED whereas they are barely made out with the naked eye IRL. Orion is there in ED, I can find it easily now, but it's definitive "shape" is lost in the unrealistic representations of luminosity in ED's skybox..
Click to expand...

I think it has more to do with the difficulty of representing the reality of the universe on a computer screen. Particularly extremely bright things. Just like they can't show the actual brilliance of a star from a few Ls away, they can't show the actual brilliance of a very bright star in the sky - not without making the star bigger, or fuzzier - both of which wouldn't be terribly realistic. That's because our computer screens can only go so white, they can't make the white any brighter.
 
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serkelion

S
Berpol said:
Perhaps a stupid idea, but have you visited the star or checked its stats in EDDB?
Perhaps they changed the star (though 1000 years are not a long time).
Click to expand...

As Berpol pointed out, maybe 37 Cygni is not even in the game. I'm not an expert players (started playing just 3 months ago), but I tried to find it in the galaxy map, in EDDB and in EDSM and I didn't find it. But maybe it has a different name, or maybe I didn't manage to execute the advanced search correctly.

BTW: nice to see I'm not alone wondering about this topic! :)
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
37 Cygni or Gamma Cygni is also known as "Sadr", which is the name it is known under in ED. It even has an entire sector named after it, the "Sadr Region Sector".

Sadr is a yellow-white supergiant, 1825 LYs away from Sol towards the Galactic Core. In-game, it is uninhabited with no planets, just two companion K-class stars, which matches what we know of the real-life version of the star system (about 1800 LYs away, two visible companions).

I assume that it is not as visible in-game as it "should" be because ED haven't quite got the stats for this star correct. The real-life star is estimated at about 12 solar-masses; the ED version is only 1.1094 solar-masses, so it's much smaller - and therefore much dimmer. Probably just a typo - the decimal point is in the wrong place. This is why there is indeed a star in the Sol skybox pic the OP posted, where Sadr should be, but it's much dimmer than it should be.

And before anyone says, "Well, they should fix it", unfortunately, we're pretty much stuck with it the way it is. The way the Stellar Forge works, the procedurally-generated stars in the area around Sadr are sharing a common "pool" of mass. If you suddenly add 11 more solar-masses to Sadr, that mass will get sucked out of the surrounding space and half a dozen stars nearby will no longer have the mass they need to be created by the Stellar Forge. This would have a knock-on effect, with other stars appearing and disappearing throughout the sector, until the entire sector would get re-written and everyone's First Discoveries there would get deleted.
 
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Sapyx

Sapyx
I should perhaps add that, while Sadr itself is uninhabited, just a few LYs away is the Sadr Region Sector GW-W c1-22 system, within which is the Sadr Logistics Depot asteroid base.

I should also point out that when I said "towards the Core", I realise I got my EDSM co-ordinates mixed up. It's actually almost due West, 90 degrees from the Core.
 

Shinji Ikari

Shinji Ikari
Jackie Silver said:
We generally do not know the distances of stars that accurately, so treat any "distances" given on Wikipedia as highly suspect. It is hard to measure the distance to a star.

(The same goes for lists of "the biggest stars." Generally speaking we get the direction of the star, and we get its spectrum and brightness, and make a chain of estimates based on those. Parallax measurements (e.g. HIPPARCOS and now GAIA) help narrow down the distance but there are still uncertainties.)
Click to expand...

How precise could the measurements be with the Wide Field Camera 3 of Hubble? According to a paper in arXiv, it can measure arclengths with a precision of 20-40 microarcseconds.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0484
 
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