What/Where is that?
- Thread starter Kelster87
- Start date
Yeah, I noticed that in the sky box the other day. What does it look like when you get real close, or does the formation disappear?
I spotted a blue one a few months ago as i was headed 'west'. I was hoping it would be a small nebula or similar but after searching the galaxy map for a bit realised it was outside the galaxy, part of the local group.
NGC 7822 usually presents as a line of stars
Is it supposed to? Not suggesting it is or isn't, was just going off a comment above about the depth being inaccurate.NGC 7822 usually presents as a line of stars
What do you mean by "supposed to"?
Is NGC 7822 (or the numerous other real star clusters in the game) actually a linear structure in the real world? No, there's no reason to think so. They're probably spheroids of stars, but the aforementioned distance errors in the stellar catalogs that Frontier used to populate the galaxy result in them being smeared out into lines pointing away from Sol.
But is that how it's supposed to appear in the game? Yes, that line is a faithful representation of where those stars are placed in the ED model of the galaxy.
I am interested in the coloration though. They normally appear bright blue from very great distances. I wonder if the rendering changes in Odyssey have also changed how distant stars are seen through the dusty plane of the galaxy?
Ok, so let me try to get this straight. The reason these stars are all a similar distance away from Sol in ED is because we, here on earth, can't tell actually how far away they are in reality? Whereas, in reality they could be a completely different configuration depth wise, we just can't tell from earth? Doesn't that mean though that it's possible the depth could be correct, we just don't know?
Where's @Sapyx the astronomer when you need him?
Lucky you, there's quite a few lurking astronomers around here. That was my original discipline too!
To think about what's going on, I would actually start from the other end. In the real world, there is a nebula called NGC 7822 where a large number of young massive stars have formed. Because they all formed from the same collapsing gas cloud, the stars are all in close proximity, in astronomical terms. Since the size of the nebula is small compared to the distance from Earth, it's fair to say that they are all at about the same distance from Sol. The most likely result from a cloud that collapses under gravity is a spheroid, so it's likely that the stars are also distributed in a rough spheroid scattered through the nebula.
What happens when astronomers catalog things though, is that all the values are recorded to the greatest precision allowed by the instruments. Telescopes can record angular position to exquisite precision - that's kind of their main job. However, stars don't come with a big label telling you how far away they are. Take a look up at the night sky in the summer. Two of the brightest stars overhead are Vega and Deneb. They look pretty similar, but one is 25 LY away, and the other is over 2000. Now there are various methods for working out how far away a star is, and a common theme is that the closer the star, the more accurate you can be. We know the distance to Vega to within a tenth of a light year, or better than 1% accuracy. The distance to Deneb is uncertain by +/- 200 light years, or around 10%.
So NGC 7822 is around 3000 LY away; measurements of its distance are only accurate to about 20%. Meanwhile, the cluster itself is only about 100 LY across. As a result, the error bars on the distance are a good deal larger than the cluster itself. Now what a professional astronomer would usually do would be to treat the cluster as a single object and pretend all the stars are at the same distance, or apply random offsets calibrated to match some model of the cluster. Frontier wasn't going to do that - they had hundreds of thousands of stars to add to the galaxy from catalogs, and presumably didn't have the time to go through and apply manual fixups to each dataset. So the positions of the stars in the ED galaxy are generally the raw coordinates from the catalogs, translated mechanically from the coordinate system astronomers use (angular position and distance) into the x/y/z of the ED galaxy. That means the random distance uncertainties were treated as literal distance values, leading to clusters smeared out into linear shapes pointing back at Earth. Just about every distant cluster in the ED galaxy shows this effect.
Thank you for an excellent explanation
I'm not an astronomer, I (and presumably MishaTX & others too) just know from being on the forum a while that when a thread starts with 'what is this?' and shows a picture of the skybox that NGC 7822 is often what the player has seen, since it stands out as 'odd'
There are lots of hand-placed stars in clusters that look fine from Sol or nearby, but start to look odd as they are viewed from a different angle. I think what was achieved with Stellar Forge was fantastic and noticing and investigating stuff on the skybox like this & learning about both the IRL stars themselves as a result, and how the galaxy was created in the game are both fascinating subjects to drill down into, warts & all.
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Funny how you all assume it's NGC 7822 - I've asked that question before.. And the pics looked way different.. NGC 7822 has always appeared to be a string of whitish stars from a distance, not the colourful thing in the OP. I'm probably wrong, but did anyone actually bother to check? Where's the dark cloud usually found just near NGC 7822?
It is not NGC 7822 - if you look up the system name in the original screenshot (which I confess I did not do before now), OP is about 6000 LY too far south. But it's almost certainly a similar phenomenon. There are a number of real clusters in the game out near that location, as the Heart & Soul Nebulae are embedded in a massive star forming complex that gives rise to many minor nebulae and clusters of young stars.