I was thinking about writing a program that computes the actual spacial coordinates from gate addresses, locates nearest stars, and maybe even render the sky from that location. I have the code for working with star catalogs and most of the rendering code sitting over from another little project.
I tried to use the Earth address and to come up with anything meaningful, and so far, have been unable to do so.
The address for Earth that I dug up was, Auriga (28), Cetus (26) Centaurus (5) Cancer (36) Scutum (11) and Eridanus (29). Now, trying to use each of these as a point in 3D space is a bit meaningless, as each constellation contains hundreds of thousands of cubic parsecs of space. They may be relatively confined on the celestial sphere, but their radial distribution can be huge.
There are many ways in which a single point can be selected, but two come to mind as most meaningful. A center of mass or geometric center may be used. That, however, will vary greatly with how many stars from within constellation boundaries you wish to select, so it doesn't seem to be likely. Another, is to chose the brightest star in constellation. It would be most meaningful to chose such star by absolute magnitude, but apparent magnitude from specific location is also an option.
I started by brightest apparent magnitude because that would be easier to sort for, and because the pictograms are based on constellations as seen from Earth or somewhere not far, so most likely, the brightest star from there would be the same one.
I converted data for these stars to rectangular coordinate system, using RA=0h, Dec=0° as the X axis, RA=6h, Dec=0°, and Dec=+90° as the Z axis. All distances are taken to be in parsecs.
1.68, 8.80, 9.28
27.46, 5.29, -9.08
-0.49, -0.41, -1.14
-49.21, 72.62, 15.05
8.02, -51.84, 7.60
21.68, 9.85, -37.00
Now, the trouble with these is that no pair results in the line that passes anywhere near 0, 0, 0, where Sol would be located. And if the intersection of the lines was supposed to point to the gate location, this simply wouldn't work.
So is there a problem with the numbers? Something I misunderstood about the method? Or did the creators of the show make up addresses without any concern for where they point? Later does seem likely, but why make up the entire idea of locating gates using real existing points as reference if you aren't going to at least try to actually apply these rules?
On the side note, the very idea of using lines of intersection seems a bit absurd. If two lines intersect in space, they already pinpoint a location. And if they don't, throwing in the 3rd line does not help.
What would have worked better is taking the lines as normal vectors, and constructing an intersection point as intersection of 3 planes given by the 3 star pairs. The plane would pass through one of the stars in the pair and be perpendicular to the line given by the stars. Such 3 planes are guaranteed to intersect in a single point, and you need exactly 6 reference points to make it work. Having 38 fixed points in space for that would allow pinpointing a gate fairly precisely, as long as it is in the vicinity of these points. (I did try comparing numbers to this method, and didn't come up with anything working here either.)
Anybody has any ideas on how to make this work with Earth address? Or should this idea be abandoned all together.
I tried to use the Earth address and to come up with anything meaningful, and so far, have been unable to do so.
The address for Earth that I dug up was, Auriga (28), Cetus (26) Centaurus (5) Cancer (36) Scutum (11) and Eridanus (29). Now, trying to use each of these as a point in 3D space is a bit meaningless, as each constellation contains hundreds of thousands of cubic parsecs of space. They may be relatively confined on the celestial sphere, but their radial distribution can be huge.
There are many ways in which a single point can be selected, but two come to mind as most meaningful. A center of mass or geometric center may be used. That, however, will vary greatly with how many stars from within constellation boundaries you wish to select, so it doesn't seem to be likely. Another, is to chose the brightest star in constellation. It would be most meaningful to chose such star by absolute magnitude, but apparent magnitude from specific location is also an option.
I started by brightest apparent magnitude because that would be easier to sort for, and because the pictograms are based on constellations as seen from Earth or somewhere not far, so most likely, the brightest star from there would be the same one.
I converted data for these stars to rectangular coordinate system, using RA=0h, Dec=0° as the X axis, RA=6h, Dec=0°, and Dec=+90° as the Z axis. All distances are taken to be in parsecs.
1.68, 8.80, 9.28
27.46, 5.29, -9.08
-0.49, -0.41, -1.14
-49.21, 72.62, 15.05
8.02, -51.84, 7.60
21.68, 9.85, -37.00
Now, the trouble with these is that no pair results in the line that passes anywhere near 0, 0, 0, where Sol would be located. And if the intersection of the lines was supposed to point to the gate location, this simply wouldn't work.
So is there a problem with the numbers? Something I misunderstood about the method? Or did the creators of the show make up addresses without any concern for where they point? Later does seem likely, but why make up the entire idea of locating gates using real existing points as reference if you aren't going to at least try to actually apply these rules?
On the side note, the very idea of using lines of intersection seems a bit absurd. If two lines intersect in space, they already pinpoint a location. And if they don't, throwing in the 3rd line does not help.
What would have worked better is taking the lines as normal vectors, and constructing an intersection point as intersection of 3 planes given by the 3 star pairs. The plane would pass through one of the stars in the pair and be perpendicular to the line given by the stars. Such 3 planes are guaranteed to intersect in a single point, and you need exactly 6 reference points to make it work. Having 38 fixed points in space for that would allow pinpointing a gate fairly precisely, as long as it is in the vicinity of these points. (I did try comparing numbers to this method, and didn't come up with anything working here either.)
Anybody has any ideas on how to make this work with Earth address? Or should this idea be abandoned all together.
Comment