Tag Archive for 'education'

[2300AD] Near Star Map Astrosynthesis DB file

Published on February 10, 2013 in 2300AD, Gaming, RPGs and Stellar Mapping. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This week I received an email request for the Astrosynthesis DB file that I used to make my realistic 2300AD near star/arms map, and after digging it up I figured I may as well post it for everyone to use. It uses a special version of the realistic stellar databases that I’ve presented elsewhere on this site – it has the 2300AD-specific names for the stars and systems, so it shouldn’t be used for scientific purposes (I think it just uses the RECONS + DENSE + Hipparcos databases). As usual, please don’t redistribute this yourself – just link back to this page if you want to spread the word!

Instructions: Click the image below to download the 2300AD_DB.zip file, unzip it into a local folder, open Astrosynthesis 3.0, and open the unzipped 2300AD.AstroDB file from there. Hopefully it’s some use! :)

2300AD Astrosynthesis 3.0 database file



Copyright stuff: The 2300 AD game in all forms is owned by Far Future Enterprises. Copyright 1986 – 2012 Far Future Enterprises. 2300 AD is a registered trademark of Far Future Enterprises. Far Future permits web sites and fanzines for this game, provided it contains this notice, that Far Future is notified, and subject to a withdrawal of permission on 90 days notice. The contents of this site are for personal, non-commercial use only. Any use of Far Future Enterprises’s copyrighted material or trademarks anywhere on this web site and its files should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks. In addition, any program/articles/file on this site cannot be republished or distributed without the consent of the author who contributed it.

[Stellar Mapping] Extended Hipparcos dataset added!

Published on March 12, 2012 in Science, Stellar Mapping and Worldbuilding. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I’ve now replaced the New Reduction Hipparcos data with the new Extended Hipparcos (HIPX) dataset published in 2012 by Anderson & Francis (see this paper for all the details). The HIPX dataset expands the original dataset to include luminosities, spectral types and much more useful astronomical data from a variety of sources, making this the definitive source of information about these stars! The searchable online HIPX catalogue is located at http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-3?-source=+V/137A/XHIP.

The HIPX data replaces the New Reduction Hipparcos data on this website – Astrosynthesis and Galactic XYZ data have both been updated! In most cases the HIPX XYZ data is identical to the New Reduction Hipparcos XYZs, but issues with the parallaxes for some of the multiple systems in the New Reduction data led to significant inaccuracies there – in those cases, the parallaxes were reverted back to the original Hipparcos parallax data (again, refer to the XHIP paper for further explanation).

The XHIP data includes more star names (including common/arabic names), which are also presented here. However, note that Gliese numbers higher than 3000 have been removed for ease of reference. Technically these numbers aren’t “Gliese numbers”, they’re “NN” or “Wo(oley)” numbers. Because this could cause confusion, I decided to remove them instead of editing them all, but this isn’t a huge loss since the stars can still be tracked using their HIP numbers or other names.

If you’ve been using the New Reduction data, then be sure to head over to my Stellar Mapping page to download the new Extended Hipparcos dataset!

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In other news, my Stellar Mapping page now has the Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval! This is Winchell Chung’s way of saying that he likes my work, and I’m very happy about that because I’ve been a fan of his Atomic Rockets website pretty much since it first appeared online (it’s a great resource for any SF fan)! His 3D Starmaps site is also one of the main inspirations for my own stellar mapping efforts! Thanks, Winchell! :)

[Stellar Mapping] CTIOPI dataset added, Stellar Mapping page reorganised!

Published on February 27, 2012 in Science, Stellar Mapping and Worldbuilding. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I have now added the CTIOPI (Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory Parallax Investigation) dataset to my Stellar Mapping page! CTIOPI is another dataset from the RECONS group, aimed at locating red, white, and brown dwarfs that are within 25pc of Sol – it adds 164 stars that are mostly contained within 300 ly of Sol. However, it only covers (roughly) the southern sky as viewed from Earth, so only about half of the volume around Sol contains stars from this dataset – that said, the distribution of CTIOPI stars could be used as a guideline for adding fictional stars in the rest of the volume.

CTIOPI dataset, looking corewards.

I have also edited the DENSE dataset to remove all the stars that were duplicated in CTIOPI and HIPPARCOS datasets – the most accurate data has been retained (the original DENSE dataset is no longer available here, though I may make it available again in a later blog update). The CTIOPI dataset has also been edited somewhat to remove duplicates (none of the CTIOPI stars have HIP numbers though, though it does include one star – HIP 3856 – that is missing from the Hipparcos dataset). All CTIOPI entries within 22.7 lightyears have also been removed to avoid overlap with RECONS.

This means that there should now be no duplicated stars at all if the RECONS, DENSE, CTIOPI and HIPPARCOS datasets are used together, so the combined dataset is now about as accurate as it can be. Full details of these edits can be found in the “CTIOPI-DENSE merging details” section in the Astrosynthesis.txt and Galactic.txt files contained in the new RECONS-DENSE-CTIOPI.zip file available from Section 2 of the Stellar Mapping page.

I’ve also updated and reorganised the Stellar Mapping page to (hopefully) make it easier to decide which datasets to use. If you have already downloaded the DENSE dataset then you should download it again to make sure you have the latest version!

[Stellar Mapping] The 2300AD Near Star Map

Published on February 13, 2012 in 2300AD, Gaming, RPGs, Science and Stellar Mapping. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

The 2300AD Near Star Map

The 2300AD RPG – originally published by Game Designer’s Workshop in 1988 – presented an excellent gritty, realistic near-future hard sci-fi setting with lots of exploration, mystery, and interesting aliens. It’s also about to be republished by Mongoose Publishing as a setting for their version of the Traveller RPG!

One of 2300AD’s most interesting features is that the setting is built around a realistic (for the 1980s) Near Star List based on the Gliese Catalogue (2nd Version). FTL travel in 2300AD has a maximum range of 7.7 lightyears, resulting in the creation of “Arms” that extend from Sol to connect only the stars that are within this range of eachother (this limit can potentially be extended to 11.55 ly using Stutterwarp tugs, but this is expensive and uncommon).

There are three of these Arms, each colonised by a different political power in the setting – the French Arm, the Chinese Arm, and the American Arm. The French Arm stretches “upwards” from Sol towards Galactic North, ending at the orange giant star Arcturus. The American and Chinese Arms share the same beginning, but split off so that the American Arm heads Coreward/Spinward while the Chinese Arm sprawls around the (galactic) southern part of the solar neighbourhood.

Unfortunately the Near Star List (NSL) has not been updated for the new version of 2300AD. A lot of stars have been discovered in the solar neighbourhood since the late 1980s (as shown on my Stellar Mapping page), and the locations and distances of existing stars have been greatly refined since then too – so how does the updated stellar data affect the Arms?
Continue reading ‘[Stellar Mapping] The 2300AD Near Star Map’

[Stellar Mapping] How to make your own stellar database!

Published on February 4, 2012 in Science, Stellar Mapping and Worldbuilding. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Looks like my new Stellar Mapping page has been well received so far – thanks to everyone who has shown an interest in it, I hope you’re finding it useful!

In this article I’m going to show you how to make your own stellar database, with the same tools I used to construct the ones I presented on my mapping page. For this exercise we’ll be relying on something called VizieR, which is a huge online database of thousands of star catalogues. You’ll need to have a basic understanding astronomy to make the most out of this, but it’s not that tricky.

Let’s say you want to make a database of stars in a corridor between Sol and the famous Pleiades star cluster (if you’re familiar with the 2300AD RPG, this is essentially the path the Bayern took to the Pleiades). We’ll be using the Hipparcos star catalogue, since it has the most accurate parallax measurements (from which we can derive distances).

Continue reading ‘[Stellar Mapping] How to make your own stellar database!’

Website Update: Stellar Mapping page updated!

Published on January 30, 2012 in Gaming, Science, Stellar Mapping and Worldbuilding. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

My new Stellar Mapping page is finally online! This is a complete rewrite of my previous “Realistic Astrography” page, and now includes Equatorial to Galactic co-ordinate conversion files, the complete RECONS (2012) and DENSE star lists, as well as all the data from the Hipparcos, Gliese 3, and Yale catalogues for stars out to 300ly from Sol! And the Further Stars list is also in there too :)

RECONS-coreward

RECONS dataset, looking towards the galactic core.

The focus has moved away from Traveller and its hex map format (I realised that I was taking accurate data and then making it inaccurate by forcing it into hex map format, so I’ve dropped that completely) and moved towards raw data and Astrosynthesis, but this will still be very useful for anyone interested in using realistic data for the stars near Sol.

You can check it out at http://evildrganymede.net/rpgs/stellar-mapping/

I’ll be writing some articles in the coming weeks to expand this – this will include how to use the Vizier stellar databases, and what this means for the 2300AD RPG!

Still alive

Published on May 22, 2011 in Science. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Well, I’m still here. So, apparently, is everyone else. Earthquakes, tidal waves, Great Beast Dagon rising, people ascending to heaven, etc etc didn’t happen. I particularly appreciated the inspired elegance of Eternal Earthbound Pets, an atheist-run company set up to look after the pets of people who have been “taken to heaven” in the Rapture (no refunds of course! And being atheists, they’d definitely be left behind so you know they’ll be there to take care of your beloved animal companions! Genius! ;) ).

On a more serious note, science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson raised an interesting point on Twitter today – “If Jesus actually arrives May 21, it’ll be easy to convince skeptics. If he doesn’t show up, do the faithful become atheists?”

It’d be nice to think that they would… but I suspect that people who genuinely believed that they’d be “taken to heaven” are already so far gone from rational thought that they’d just come up with excuses like how their faith has been “tested”, or that human error in calculating the date was to blame and that the Rapture would still happen at a later date, and just keep on believing (in some cases, because their faith is literally all they have now). I’ve even seen people ‘correcting’ the Rapture-believers by saying that the bible says that “no man will know the date”, but that doesn’t get around the fundamental problem that they’re believing a work of fiction that has no basis in reality to start with! Irrationality is funny like that.

EDIT: Yep. The “believers” interviewed in this article from The Independent are all making excuses rather than abandoning their faith. Typical.

I guess the next scheduled “end of the world as we know it” will be the Mayan Apocalypse in December 2012, so we have about 18 months to prepare for the next bout of insanity to sweep the world (and IMO that one’s even crazier than the Rapture). And I wonder why I sometimes feel I’m fighting a losing battle to educate people about science… I think I’ll go hug my copy of “The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan now (which I would say is required reading for everyone).

Rapture: It ain’t gonna happen.

Published on May 20, 2011 in Science. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I’m really hoping that the mainstream media/news sites are discussing this “Rapture” rubbish because they’re making fun of it (World supposedly ends on May 21st. Again. *yawn*), because my own feelings about it are neatly summarised by this:

It’s kinda disturbing to see full articles about it on CBC and the BBC news websites though (and undoubtedly there are many elsewhere too). I’d like to hope that most people are smart enough to realise that this prediction is just the delusional ravings of a madman, but there are undoubtedly a lot of people in the world who are less educated and who don’t know better who may believe it – and spreading the word about it even further in mainstream media is not helpful (and no, I’m not going to propagate it further by linking to the articles here – if you have no idea what I’m talking about then you’re much better off that way! ;) ).

At best this sort of thing should be in the “offbeat” section of the news sites, not on the main pages. Ideally though, I don’t even think it should even be mentioned at all by them because it doesn’t deserve any attention – and yet, here we are. People believe in this sort of thing because they don’t know much about science, or how to reason or think critically about things, but the media just seems to want to propagate the story further instead of either ignoring it or pointing out that it’s nonsense. I wonder if the media will be reporting every crazy prediction made by every lunatic now? Again, I refer the reader to the Facepalm above.

So here’s my (scientific) prediction for what will happen on May 21st – absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. “Millions of people” will not “disappear” or be “raptured”. About 360,000 babies will be born, and about 155,000 people will die (ref), as happens every day on Earth. Life will go on as normal for everyone, except for the thousands of people who were dumb enough to be so taken in by the Rapture nonsense that they gave away their money or worldly goods, and I guess they’ll be feeling pretty stupid.

While it may have the odd historical account in it, the christian bible is largely a work of fiction (with many edits and embellishments over the millennia as well to distort/destroy anything that wasn’t). And the Book of Revelations is absolutely a particularly fanciful work of fiction (it’s a fun read as such though!). Hence, the Rapture ain’t gonna happen.

And as Apocalypses go, the Rapture is apparently a very considerate one. After all, it doesn’t start in one place and spread outwards from there (like an asteroid impact), it actually goes methodically by timezone across the world, happening at the same local time in each one. Apparently God is not only “vengeful” and “generous”, but he’s also convenient!

I suspect this craziness is only going to get worse as 2012 approaches… meanwhile, I’ll see you alll on May 22nd ;)

(P.S. Sorry for the lack of updates here recently – I’ve been busy with work and other projects recently and haven’t had too much time to write articles!)

Happy Sagan Day!

Published on November 9, 2010 in Science. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Today would be Carl Sagan’s birthday if he was still alive, so Kepler and SETI have declared today as “Sagan Day” and invited people to send in essays about science and our place in the universe, inspired by his “Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”.

I watched Cosmos again a few months ago and it’s still a great series and well worth watching – Prof. Sagan was a darn fine educator, and really put across the wonder of the universe and how deeply he was affected by it all. I think that’s why I like Brian Cox and his Wonders of the Solar System series, because he did pretty much the same thing (unsurprisingly, Prof. Sagan was one of his big influences too).

Cosmos didn’t get me into astronomy – I was already into it by the time I saw it (being a Brit, Sir Patrick Moore and Heather Couper were probably a bigger influence on me) – but Cosmos did leave several indellible impressions on me, and it certanly reinforced my fascination with science and astronomy:

- The biggest impression, oddly enough, was a fascination with the Periodic Table, as explained by the man himself in The Lives of Stars episode, from Cosmos – ever since then I’ve had a bizarre fascination with Praseodymium :) . I love reading about the elements and their properties and their uses (webelements.com is one of my favourite sites ;) ), and I would kill to have a “real” periodic table that had samples of all the elements like the one shown in the clip!

- Another big impression was the “Ship of the Imagination” (seen in some of the other videos below) that Sagan used to travel around the universe in the show. More than anything else I would have love to be able to go on such a trip, unconstrained by time or physical limits, and see the wonders of the universe first-hand. I guess that’s why I’m so into scifi :) .

- There’s the Encyclopaedia Galactica, which I’m about 100% certain is what got me into Worldbuilding. Who knows what worlds are out there, waiting to be found? We’ve only just started to discover them. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to imagine what they could be like. :)

- And the Cosmic Calendar, where Sagan compresses all of time since the Big Bang into one calendar year, and shows us how completely insignificant all of human achievement is in time.

- And finally, a sobering reminder of our own mortality and the fragility of our planet, made vivid by the telling of a chilling dream that Sagan had. I guess he was one of the first people that I was aware of who was an environmentalist, who told us that we should be taking care of our planet and ourselves. It’s a pity that 30 years later we’re still making a mess of it all.

The other big thing was the music – the soundtrack of the series is varied and eclectic, ranging from classical pieces, to Vangelis electronica, to Bulgarian folk music. But it’s all memorable, and quite timeless.

It’s impossible to watch Cosmos without being inspired by it – Sagan’s explanations are spell-binding and enrapturing, and it’s still one of the best science shows ever made. He explains things clearly and succinctly, isn’t afraid to go into detail where necessary, puts his obvious passion across, and doesn’t patronise the audience. You couldn’t ask for a better teacher, and he’s inspirational for me in that regard as I try to get into science education myself.

So, thanks for everything, Professor Sagan (and Happy Birthday!) :)