Celestia Forums

No The tank is in the garden. Gutters go from patio to tank by the ground. Ok... Must be great not having to worry about permafrost. This sort of arrangement would freeze and break in my part of the world. Sorry, I perhaps used a bad word. In the 'pantry', you find a washing machine, a sink, a litt...

Ok...your water tank is beneath the patio. I'd suggest paying careful attention to water purity, as things other than water can make it into the tank. (I had a relative who died from this sort of thing a few years ago - a sort of 'hippie', I guess you could call him. Lived by himself way out in the ...

Done my share of construction down through the decades (comes from growing up on a homestead in Alaska). First observation is I don't see a direct interior access from the garage to the rest of the house. Second is...are the solar panels used to provide electricity directly? Or are you using them to...

Yep. Identifying stars that might host earthlike worlds was my goal. There a few years ago, I made the same kind of research. I limited myself to dwarf F7V class to K3V. Before F7 is a bit too hot for life and beyond K3, there is too much lethal radiations for "life". I kept it as single s...

Why did you choose these giant or supergiant stars ?
They are cooler and bigger than a little nice dwarf like sun.

I was wondering the same thing.

My interests are focused on dwarf stars from about F5V to M1V.

Uhgg... Polaris = Alpha Ursa Minor = HD 8890 Distance works out to around 132 parsecs or 430 light years. I found a listing for Polaris proper as being a specroscopic binary with a an orbital period 6.8 years. Additionally, there is an 'unresolved blue companion with an orbital period calculated at ...

So basically even if a system is identified as being, say, a 5-star system, these are just quick-and-dirty assumptions someone's made by glancing at the catalog info and I shouldn't worry about them? That would make life easier. LOL Thank you for going over the info; I'll see what to do about it ne...

Ok...I went and did some digging in the depths of the WDS, Vizier, Simbad, and elsewhere. First, the basics: Alcyone = 25 Tau = HD 23630 = DM +23.00541 = WDS J03475+2406 The Hip parallax works out to a distance of 123.6 parsecs or 403 light years. Margin of error is within 10%, meaning this number i...

Sixth Catalog of Orbits of Visual Binaries (real catchy title). Basically all the double star orbits published. I made frequent use of it in my own project a few years ago, along with the WDS. If memory serves, there are images of the orbits available as well. http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astrometr...

For double star orbits, your best bet would be the 'Double Star Library' (should turn up on google).

If those systems have published orbits, that is where they will be.

Worth noting: At least some systems are optical (not true doubles)

Warp drive no, 'subspace communicator'...maybe? Used to see the odd article or discussion elsewhere pertaining to problems with dark matter / dark energy, relativity, and quantum mechanics. There were some very bright folks who came up with alternative explanations for this (allowing for vastly less...

For what little it might be worth, I made a data base, now an 'addon' containing over 30,000 more or less sunlike stars not in the primary version of Celestia.

And there you have it. I really, really appreciate Starguys efforts here. He put a lot of thought, a lot of work, and a lot of time into this project (hopefully he don't get in trouble with his real job over this). I then wrote a program to apply them to a set of stars, and downloaded all the stars ...

I suspect that's because you're using spectroscopy to determine the distances. Spectroscopy (and really, every kind of astronomy, although now we have all-sky surveys like Tycho) has mostly been done in the northern hemisphere. Even today, most people still prefer to go a few miles out of town to o...

Nearly done, at least done enough to call it quits for the next six or eight months. Just finishing up a last wee bit of editing and putting a 'key' together. At this point, about 32,000 stars (the numbers really cratered in the far southern declinations for whatever reason). That still leaves me ab...

Brings back memories of the old 'Face on Mars' fad that was briefly popular back in the 80's. The big book about that was less noteworthy for its actual content than because the authors were attempting a sort adhoc explanation for a new and radical communication concept at the time - something calle...

If I understood that correctly (and very possibly I did not), and the conclusions in the article hold up, then part of the current lore on physics is in for a serious update.

A world government... based on Earth? Wouldn't the (human) Martians actually living there want a say in the matter? This is actually one of the main plot drivers in the 'Mars' series. Apart from that, considering it would take a good couple centuries minimum before you could breathe the air and avo...

That depends on your definition of "realistic". To illustrate, there is a huge difference between "doesn't break any known laws of physics" and "is achieveable in the foreseeable future". I haven't read the Mars trilogy, but I would assume that it leans towards the lat...

'science thrown out the window' about sums that up. As far as terraforming other bodies in the real solar system, the best option, far and away, would be Mars. Kim Stanely Robinson in his 'Mars' trilogy (fiction, with a lot of science thrown in) took the most readable comprehensive stab at this...bu...