I was roaming through the galaxy map and decided to check out the eagle nebula and saw this group of stars in the eagle nebula. is it a glitch or is it intentional
What is it with Eagle Nebula?
- Thread starter NONSTOPPE9
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I was roaming through the galaxy map and decided to check out the eagle nebula and saw this group of stars in the eagle nebula. is it a glitch or is it intentional
A bit of both.
In real-world astronomy, telling the direction that a star is in from Earth is extremely easy (you can get pretty good precision by looking at the sky without instruments!). Telling its distance is extremely difficult, and estimates can be uncertain by hundreds of light-years, especially for more distant stars. So if you want to use real-world data to add stars to a game, you need to decide how far away to place them yourself - and in some cases, those estimates have ended up clustering rather more than the real stars do.
e.g. you have a bunch of stars where the data source estimates a distance of 7500-8500 LY, and you decide to just take the middle of each range as the most likely value. So you end up with all of them being almost exactly 8000 LY away, and you get something like this.
There are various other anomalous patterns like this around the galaxy - a lot of the time they look like a dense line of stars pointed at Sol, because they came from a comprehensive survey of a very small patch of sky, so the catalogue has hundreds of stars with very similar directions and very uncertain distances.
Sourced from a star catalogue as Ian wrote. There are a couple of these clusters out there but also a lot of single systems. Biggest clue is the name itself. ProcGen systems use the pattern [Sector Name] [Sub-Sector] [Boxel ID] (roughly). Example from your screenshot:
Catalogue systems otoh deviate follow the pattern established by the surveyors. In your screenshot those are the ones starting with "OJV2009", another big (biggest?) source out there is "2MASS" (2 Micron All-Sky Survey).
Catalogue systems otoh deviate follow the pattern established by the surveyors. In your screenshot those are the ones starting with "OJV2009", another big (biggest?) source out there is "2MASS" (2 Micron All-Sky Survey).
Yep, I went to the start and end of the 2MASS stars, as all seemed like a huge arrow pointed towards Sol, but turns out to be nothing.
Tried min jump range exploring them all and then saw explanation for 2MASS as above.
Ideally they would've scattered the stars within the uncertainty of the measurements, rather than plugging the numbers in as is. If the numbers are measured to however many decimal places, e.g. 0.01 parsecs, they'll only be spaced at 0.01 parsec intervals from Earth and will thus form lines at those distances. And the numbers wouldn't have been quoted to a greater accuracy than 0.01 parsecs if that's the best they could be measured to. Note 0.01 parsecs is an accuracy plucked out of thin air to demonstrate the example, nothing more.
Forgot to mention they are all of the same star class too. It just looks very out of place.
Bright stars, easier to detect.
Someone posted this on Reddit a couple years ago and it makes sense to me:
"From Earth, that looks like a corrupted telescope image, where the star is smudged and they couldn't pinpoint it exactly.
You see, they tried to create a 3D model of the galaxy, from the 2D pictures and astronomical data that NASA has. In some locations the data was blurry / had errors in it. With 400,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy, the devs didn't have time to check and fix possible errors with each star."
Source:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/j8qi3f/is_this_some_sort_of_glitch_in_the_eagle_nebula/
"From Earth, that looks like a corrupted telescope image, where the star is smudged and they couldn't pinpoint it exactly.
You see, they tried to create a 3D model of the galaxy, from the 2D pictures and astronomical data that NASA has. In some locations the data was blurry / had errors in it. With 400,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy, the devs didn't have time to check and fix possible errors with each star."
Source:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/j8qi3f/is_this_some_sort_of_glitch_in_the_eagle_nebula/