This was a project I was working on last spring. I basically concluded that it can't be done and here's the proof why. But maybe someone can prove me wrong and try to figure it out.
I would count the stars shown on most view screens where the star is considered charted like here in the astrometrics lab.
but if the screen is a simulation of some kind where we don't know if the stars actually exist or were just made up in the simulation, a discussion could be made about whether those should count as stars or not. Like in Enterprise episode "strategem"
In scenes where stars are shown outside of the window it's possible that they will reuse the same stars for different scenes.
First I tried counting them by hand which was pretty tedious... This is from the first moments of episode "The Cage"
Then I wrote an application that would try to count the stars for me.
I ran into the problem of trying to define what should be considered a star. How small is too small and how dark is too dark.
These were the numbers I was getting. Where RGB(255, 255, 255) requires that a star have some perfectly white pixels and RGB(0,0,0) is completely black
RGB(40, 40, 40) = 504 stars
RGB(30, 30, 30) = 595 stars
RGB(20, 20, 20) = 710 stars
RGB(12, 12, 12) = 812 stars
RGB(10, 10, 10) = 850 stars
RGB(5, 5, 5) = 940 stars
RGB(3, 3, 3) = 1003 stars
RGB(1, 1, 1) = 1970 stars
I had this one show the individual star counts
People's vision varies, what might be visible to some people would not be visible to others. This application was able to detect stars not visible to the human eye as well. If I tried to draw a line about what's considered a "clearly visible star" or "somewhat visible star" I still ran into the same problem. No matter where I draw the line, there's a star just under that line and just above that line that visibly look the same.
Here's an example of the list of stars ordered from brightest and largest to smallest and darkest
It's like asking how many bald men are there are on earth. The problem cannot be solved without a precise definition of "hair", "man", and "bald" but these words by their nature are not precisely defined.
I think this problem is formally defined as the problem of counting something with an indeterminate identity http://rgheck.frege.org/pdf/unpublished/IndeterminateIdentity.pdf
I would count the stars shown on most view screens where the star is considered charted like here in the astrometrics lab.
but if the screen is a simulation of some kind where we don't know if the stars actually exist or were just made up in the simulation, a discussion could be made about whether those should count as stars or not. Like in Enterprise episode "strategem"
In scenes where stars are shown outside of the window it's possible that they will reuse the same stars for different scenes.
First I tried counting them by hand which was pretty tedious... This is from the first moments of episode "The Cage"
Then I wrote an application that would try to count the stars for me.
I ran into the problem of trying to define what should be considered a star. How small is too small and how dark is too dark.
These were the numbers I was getting. Where RGB(255, 255, 255) requires that a star have some perfectly white pixels and RGB(0,0,0) is completely black
RGB(40, 40, 40) = 504 stars
RGB(30, 30, 30) = 595 stars
RGB(20, 20, 20) = 710 stars
RGB(12, 12, 12) = 812 stars
RGB(10, 10, 10) = 850 stars
RGB(5, 5, 5) = 940 stars
RGB(3, 3, 3) = 1003 stars
RGB(1, 1, 1) = 1970 stars
I had this one show the individual star counts
People's vision varies, what might be visible to some people would not be visible to others. This application was able to detect stars not visible to the human eye as well. If I tried to draw a line about what's considered a "clearly visible star" or "somewhat visible star" I still ran into the same problem. No matter where I draw the line, there's a star just under that line and just above that line that visibly look the same.
Here's an example of the list of stars ordered from brightest and largest to smallest and darkest
It's like asking how many bald men are there are on earth. The problem cannot be solved without a precise definition of "hair", "man", and "bald" but these words by their nature are not precisely defined.
I think this problem is formally defined as the problem of counting something with an indeterminate identity http://rgheck.frege.org/pdf/unpublished/IndeterminateIdentity.pdf
