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Star Charts/Stellar Cartography: Avenal

DEWLine

DEWLine

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
Inspired by the upcoming revision of Stellar Cartography, I decided to pursue a question about a battle site from the Dominion War, the Avenal system from "Tacking Into the Wind". Working from Star Charts, I note that its X-Y coordinates were roughly -30 and 75 and both stars classify as B-type or close to it. Then, I went to Jed Whitten's StarMap site. Alpheratz/Alpha Andromedae seems to be a close match in colour, magnitude, and binary status. Z-axis number is -52.6212.

It is an awfully long way from there to Cardassia (HD 113337: -37.3967, 62.2453, 98.0499) along the Z-axis, though...
 
Additional thoughts:

Kochab (-37.0154, 88.7113, 82.0969) - Kora
Xi Cephei (-28.0644, 96.831, 13.0293) - Lazon
Alpha Lacertae (-19.8598, 99.6851, -11.762) - Kobheeria
Gliese 4.1/HD 123 (-29.993, 58.7604, -4.51693)- Prophet's Landing


Yea or nay?
 
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Adding a few more possibles, subject to debate and correction:
Psi Draconis - Lamemda (F5IV-V; -13.8202, 59.9896, 37.0296)
Epsilon Cephei - Delavi (F0IV; -18.6888, 81.7812, 0.574564)
Woolley 9830/HD 221613 - Dopa (G0 E ~; -31.7979, 97.6186, -32.8805)
 
DEWLine said:
Inspired by the upcoming revision of Stellar Cartography, I decided to pursue a question about a battle site from the Dominion War, the Avenal system from "Tacking Into the Wind". Working from Star Charts, I note that its X-Y coordinates were roughly -30 and 75 and both stars classify as B-type or close to it. Then, I went to Jed Whitten's StarMap site. Alpheratz/Alpha Andromedae seems to be a close match in colour, magnitude, and binary status. Z-axis number is -52.6212.

It is an awfully long way from there to Cardassia (HD 113337: -37.3967, 62.2453, 98.0499) along the Z-axis, though...
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, where does the information that HD 113337 = Cardassia come from ?

HD 114703 is where I put Cardassia on my charts, as it is a K type star as per the Star Charts book, with Bajor at HD 111513
 
I suspect that, as far as HIPPARCOS data could help him with that project, Geoffrey Mandel tried to the best of his ability to stick to real stars as much as possible. (Some of the "landmarks" of Star Trek are still specific to that fictional universe's version of our Galaxy, regardless.) Other people who helped him to those ends, of course, are still here as members of this forum, so perhaps they can confirm and/or clarify further...?
 
Basically, from the fan end of the process, it went fairly simply: the star empires were dropped in place first, in accordance with onscreen maps as far as possible, and then a totally random star within was chosen as the homestar of the player in question. This accounts for places like Ferenginar or Tzenketh or Talar or Fesarius. To a degree, it also dictated the identities of Cardassia and Bajor, their relative positioning having been established in the DS9 War Room wall maps and their absolute positioning only resulting from assumptions made about the location of Earth in the War Room maps.

Only a select few major locations got more specific treatment, stemming from background assumptions about the places. Vulcan and Romulus were defined in purely offscreen material as 40 Eri and 128 Tri; the nature of the Romulan Star Empire in onscreen maps just dictated flipping that to the (fictional) 128 Tri Australe, as the Southern Triangle is where the Raptor Clawing Twin Planets tends to reside on the onscreen graphics. Qo'noS is where "the Klingons" are located relative to "the Romulans" in a couple of onscreen maps that fail to draw a large Klingon Empire around the spot - but in-universe, it's all for the better that Qo'noS ends up at the very edge of this Empire, the borders of which were drawn with 100% artistic license.

Stars mentioned in DS9 fall on one side or the other of the "battle lines" divined from the War Room maps. Stars mentioned in TNG or VOY are randomly placed unless they are real ones. Fictional stars from TMP or TOS/TAS may have a backstage identity, as the fandom and the makers of TMP created lots of those. Locations where there is no star in the real galaxy were not chosen as identities of Trek stars AFAIK since the HIPPARCOS data offered so many options.

An underlying assumption here was that a wide range of stellar types would be compatible with Class M companions, considering the likely role of terraforming in the Trek galaxy, and the established powers of the ancient terraformers. Modern planetology suggests this isn't badly off the mark (the compatibility bit, that is - we'll find out about the terraforming bit in due time!).

It is actually intriguingly seldom that we would really get to see the suns on the skies of Qo'noS, Romulus or, say, Ferenginar on screen - no location shooting at those places, and the mattes favored cloud cover...

Timo Saloniemi
 
Semi-random musings:

Good point to be reminded about the prevalence of planet-(re)sculpting in Trek continuity.

GAIA DR 2 and onward will be providing a lot more data than HIPPARCOS - which was certainly prodigious in data-production for its day! - to play with for future revisions, expansions and licensed products extrapolating from such works, I expect. Particularly for the role-playing games from, say, Modiphius and their freelancers, and their successors as license-holders.

And then there's going to be the graphic design people working on the series and movies who might also be prompted by the scriptwriters of same to have some fun of their own...

Sidebar: I've often found myself wondering if the "revised Flamsteed" numbering of stars that seems to mark Diane Duane's novels was born in part from some copy editor back in the early days of Pocket Books' holding of the novel-publishing license accidentally, irregularly weeding out catalogue prefixes from star names.
 
Zeta Piscium is starting to look good for Mericor...or, rather, it was until GAIA DR 2 put Zeta Psc A/Revati at 130 ly, rather than Whitten's 147 ly. Five stars at minimum, although I wonder if their orbital paths around each other would allow for worlds orbiting any of them, let alone a class-M world (without meddling by, say, the Preservers to name one possibility)...

Links to show homework as follows:

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Mericor_system
http://whitten.org/index.php?x_c=-3...ormal&image_size=1500&max_line=0&trek_names=1
http://galaxymap.org/dr2/index.html?search=Zeta Piscium A&tileset=SGD&distanceEstimator=bj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_Piscium

(It's been over fifteen years, and we're getting better astronomy data about the real worlds now. That's okay.)
 
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Relatedly noting that I'm about to get my copy of Stellar Cartography 2nd Edition this weekend. I thought there was another month before they arrived at stores...?

Nope. Two weeks and change, because October 9th was the announced launch date.
 
And I have the new edition at hand here at home now. So: obsessing about Gamma Hydrae again. Because Stellar Cartography. Because "The Deadly Years" and "The Vulcan Hello". Why should Michael Burnham misremember the Shenzhou's location in the latter episode?
 
"The Vulcan Hello" has the additional complication of introducing an "Andorian colony" there, while no settlement of any sort is mentioned in connection with the "expedition" that comes to grief in the TOS episode. With the tilting balance of evidence, we might do well to place the Klingon/Romulan border close to Gamma Hydra after all. But do we also have to assume the Klingons wiped out the Andorians and the supposed Fed relief force never encountered any aging effects?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Establishing such an extended Klingon-Romulan border might be a good idea. As for the "Deadly Years" comet...that's an interesting detail. Same as the fact of there being a habitable planet orbiting Gamma Hydrae in the first place.

I think that I am going to leave that particular fact there for people to look over.
 
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