Needles in the haystack

[PlutonianEmpire]

Here's a question that should probably be obvious, but whatever.

Has anyone actually tried to find Sol, or a specific star, ONLY by turning off the HUD entirely, cranking up the Mag limit, and flying through space with the spacecraft controls?

Bonus points if you use the 1 or 2 million star databases from the ML.

I know I have.

How many of you actually managed to find what you were looking for -- *without* cheating (turning the HUD back on, using markers, typing and "G"-ing, etc).

To answer that, I've failed each time.

How 'bout you guys and gals?


And has this topic been done before? I can't remember.

[Hungry4info]

I've been able to do it. The key is that a few clusters are fairly easy to spot, the Pleiades and Hyades especially. Find them, get them lined up the right way (Verifying the shape of Taurus is correct is the easiest way to do that since Aldebaran completes the 'V' but isn't part of the cluster), and you should be within a light year or so of Sol if you do it right.

[PlutonianEmpire]

I've been able to do it. The key is that a few clusters are fairly easy to spot, the Pleiades and Hyades especially. Find them, get them lined up the right way (Verifying the shape of Taurus is correct is the easiest way to do that since Aldebaran completes the 'V' but isn't part of the cluster), and you should be within a light year or so of Sol if you do it right.

Yeah, I knew about the Pleiades, because I use it for landmarking in both Celestia and Real life. Find it and Cassiopeia, and I can use the orientation of both asterisms to find Triangulum (when doing Earth-based observations).

For 3-D navigation in Celestia, I guess we got lucky that the Pleiades happened to have the same basic shape as the Celestia rendering of the Sagittarius DEG galaxy.