Tycho's Cylinder...

[Cmdr Sharky]

Any idea what's up with this cylinder of stars in Barnard's Loop, which I've named Tycho's Cylinder because there's a star called Tycho in the middle? It could also be called the Beregovoy-Hipparchus Corridor for two stars at either end. Or Mitchell's Rod for another star in the middle. Does it have a name?

Is that just because we've pointed a telescope in that direction and studied a lot of stars, and they just made it into the E galaxy without the game smoothing out the map with more generated stars?

 

[GroG79]

In short: Yes

Made up stars are in the format qqqq rrrr st-u (a-h)#-#
Example:
wregoe cq-g d10-153

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Is that just because we've pointed a telescope in that direction and studied a lot of stars, and they just made it into the E galaxy without the game smoothing out the map with more generated stars?

Pretty close - the problem with real-world astronomy is that distance estimates are horribly imprecise, and it looks like for one reason or another the stars in that real world catalogue have been added with their distances too correlated, which means that they end up much denser than the nearby procedural background, and very obvious.

There are a few examples of this where the real stars have been spread out over a much greater distance range, and you can still find a line from the catalogue if you know to look for it, but it's not immediately visible on the galaxy map.