I began to look around for nicely collected stellar data for stars in about a 150ly (~46pc) radius around Earth. That distance gives a Jump-2 ship at least 6 months of travel to reach the edge of the mapped flattened sphere, and a Jump-6 ship at least 2 months, and I figured that would be a good start. I found various lists containing the brightest stars, or the closest stars, but many of the brightest were too far away, and the closest stars were all too close. I found various programs that displayed known stars that weren’t a map of the night sky as seen from Earth, but there was no way to get a flattened view, or even get coordinates to map them out with.

I tried using SIMBAD to output a list of stars within 150ly, but the list was enormous. I narrowed it down a bit by excluding red dwarfs, but the list was still pretty large. I decided to try and work with it to see if I could map them out. I created an Excel spreadsheet with all the stars, their RA, Dec, and Parallax. I used some formulas found on Winchell Chung’s amazing website and calculated the celestial and galactic coordinates of each star in the list. Almost done right? Not quite.

Next I had to find software that would take my list of star names and coordinates and plot them out. I figured someone out there must have written such a program in the vast sci-fi RPG community. I did find some and after numerous failed tries using various programs, many of which were outdated, neglected, or bare bones experiments, I couldn’t find anything to do what I needed. Since I wasn’t about to do it by hand or try to write something myself, I had to take another approach.

So I started searching again.

And I finally found something. And it was in a place I had been before: SolStation. I had used their Java applet, ChView, when I first started thinking about this project, but the applet was a 3-D view with no way to flatten out the Z coordinate. But they also had a PC version, which for some reason I failed to notice the first time around. Unfortunately, it was another outdated program, and it wouldn’t run on my Windows 7 laptop. Fortunately, I have a Windows XP VM on my laptop as well, so I installed it there. ChView turned out to be perfect, as it offered a data set out to 150ly (albeit 12 years old) and the default view was “top-down” , with the Z coordinate flattened.

My search was over.