In Poul Anderson's The Avatar, a spaceship leaves the Solar System by orbiting around a T machine. In space, the vast number of visible stars crowds out and conceals familiar constellations. On the one hand, astronauts are trained to recognize constellations even in space. On the other hand, they are no longer in the Solar System. However, extragalactic objects are unchanged and, after a while, the astronauts think that they are able to discern a few of the constellations, albeit altered. They deduce that they have traveled to a point between one hundred and five hundred light years "...northwest of Sol." (VIII, p. 72) Here again, we find compass points in the galaxy: immense distances but nevertheless an almost parochial system of orientation.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And Poul Anderson has suggested that space travelers and pilots would use esp. prominent and precisely located astronomical phenomena as "landmarks" which would be useful for navigating in space.
Sean
It might make sense to define a Galactic north-south, a Galactic in-out, and a Galactic east-west in a spherical coordinate system centered on the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.
There are proposals to use the pulses from pulsars as a sort of naturally occurring GPS signal that would be useful throughout the solar system and probably also on an interstellar scale.
Kaor, Jim!
That makes sense to me, for navigating both in and out of the Solar System.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment