Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping
I recently came across a neat website by Kevin Jardine: Galaxy Map.
It’s an odd site. It’s not clear how it’s all organized. It looks as if the site’s owner planned to write a book about mapping our galactic neighborhood, but the project got abandoned at some point. Nevertheless there’s a lot of interesting data and some gorgeous maps there, if you dig around a bit for them. In particular, Mr. Jardine has used the Gaia data tranches to do some really interesting mapping of relative star densities, the location of clusters and major nebulae, and the location of super-bright stars.
The most immediately useful page on the site appears to be at Galaxy Map Resources, but there’s also a collection of maps at Galaxy Map Posters that includes the one I included at the top of this post.
Really neat material there, if you’re at all interested in writing near-solar neighborhood interstellar fiction.
2 thoughts on “Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping”
The 10-parsec map featured in the posters section is affiliated with a small sample of data from GAIA, it’s on VizieR as “J/A+A/650/A201” and is so far the first GAIA-derived catalogue I’ve found that directly includes spectral types, as well as a list of some confirmed exoplanets. It only covers out to 10 parsecs, but it still may be of interest for nearby star mapping uses, since the information seems a bit easier to parse than the full DRs for the time being.
(Nod.) I’ve been following the evolution of the “10-parsec sample” and using it quite a bit for my own projects.
One thing to watch out for with Mr. Jardine’s maps is that he’s mapping the density of “hot stars,” which appears to mostly mean members of spectral types O and B. His maps show a star desert close to Sol, and at first I was concerned that the 10-parsec sample was therefore unrepresentative of overall star density. Turns out I need not have worried – there aren’t many OB types in the Local Bubble, to be sure, but ther overall density of all stars down to M dwarfs isn’t as heterogeneous as the large-scale maps suggest.