Well, "near" is a relative term. The central bulge is still over 10,000 light-years wide. Even Voyager's closest approach to the central region could've still put it years away from wherever the Cytherian homeworld was.
The Missing Milkyway
- Thread starter YARN
- Start date
Well, "near" is a relative term. The central bulge is still over 10,000 light-years wide. Even Voyager's closest approach to the central region could've still put it years away from wherever the Cytherian homeworld was.
Very true. But probably still less travel time than their projected remaining travel time to Earth, 2-3 decades more. Unless the Cytherians were located 180 degrees around the core. And who knows what else Voyager might have run into along the way, for good or ill...
This thread makes me think of the title sequence in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, with the shot of black space, upon which gradually appears a nebula, as though it were a time-lapse view of an astrophotograph soaking up more and more light, to the point where colors emerge.
I've done this myself before, and for those of you who have also done so, you know how it is: manually tracking a polar-aligned telescope across the sky with an open camera shutter to collect the invisible-to-the-eye photons can be a pretty grueling experience, especially on a cold winter night with Mother Nature bound to call sooner or later!
Overall, I must agree with Christopher: new star-field backgrounds wouldn't have been a huge deal production-wise (money wouldn't really have been an issue, either: a new star field? Just drop a non-critical effects shot elsewhere.). And it would have been easy to explain story-wise for those who didn't know what they were seeing: just throw in a bit o' dialogue along the lines of Kirk's Undiscovered Country comment about 'never thought I'd be this close' in reference to the center of the galaxy. A bit of real science, and the audience might accidentally learn something.
I remember a world atlas I had as a kid, which had a photo of the Andromeda galaxy on the inside front cover. Too young to 'get it', I always assumed it was a picture of the Milky Way, not questioning then just how a photographer would have gotten a million light-years away to take the picture! The scope of things was just beyond me then.
I've done this myself before, and for those of you who have also done so, you know how it is: manually tracking a polar-aligned telescope across the sky with an open camera shutter to collect the invisible-to-the-eye photons can be a pretty grueling experience, especially on a cold winter night with Mother Nature bound to call sooner or later!
Overall, I must agree with Christopher: new star-field backgrounds wouldn't have been a huge deal production-wise (money wouldn't really have been an issue, either: a new star field? Just drop a non-critical effects shot elsewhere.). And it would have been easy to explain story-wise for those who didn't know what they were seeing: just throw in a bit o' dialogue along the lines of Kirk's Undiscovered Country comment about 'never thought I'd be this close' in reference to the center of the galaxy. A bit of real science, and the audience might accidentally learn something.
I remember a world atlas I had as a kid, which had a photo of the Andromeda galaxy on the inside front cover. Too young to 'get it', I always assumed it was a picture of the Milky Way, not questioning then just how a photographer would have gotten a million light-years away to take the picture!
The scope of things was just beyond me then.
