Posts Tagged ‘Star Catalogues’

I started to think about how to get my hex map images into .sec files, so that any of the various and plentiful tools out there to work with and display such files would become open to me in my project. Creating .sec files would allow me to store the world locations, generate world data automatically, map out the data, create PDFs of the maps, and many other very useful things.

My first approach I thought would be the simplest. Take a pencil and paper (with pre-printed subsector grid) and start plotting the worlds based on my subsector images. It wasn’t quite that simple. First, not all the stars in the images had labels. I kept ChView open in one monitor so I could quickly select an unlabeled star and find out its name. Second, some of the stars that did have labels used catalogs such as the Bonner Durchmusterung (BD) or the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung (CP) and I wanted to try to be consistant and use HR and HD numbers for stars without Bayer or Flamsteed designations for consistency. So for those stars, I used SIMBAD to look them up and get an HR or HD number when possible.

So I began to plot out the stars on my hex paper, noting the name of the each star. Once a subsector was complete, I would then add the star spectral classification to the hex as well. For those stars I had to look up in SIMBAD, I recorded the stellar data at the same time since it was there. Otherwise I used Wikipedia if the star was present there, and SIMBAD if the star was not. I wasn’t going for complete accuracy, just rough accuracy so I wasn’t too concerned with how accurate Wikipedia was.

As you can imagine, this process was pretty tedious, because once the data was mapped on paper, I would still have to get it into a .sec file for use on the computer. So after a couple of subsectors, I decided to find an alternate method.

That’s where Universe came in.