Hey @terrylovejoy! Just woke up! I was too busy yesterday so I took the time to read through your work today before commenting!
Thanks for the shout out by the way! Is that a rectangular conformal projection? I think it serves your blog's purpose perfectly fine. I also think you could have achieved a similar outcome by utilizing a cylindrical compromise projection! I really thought there were MANY more stars within 21 lightyears from Earth! Whoa!
I'm just too jealous you can take all those shots of stars and planets on your own! I wish I had such a telescope! Each and every time I read I feel like I have to buy a telescope like yours! It has to feel great spotting all those stars and planets in the night sky and taking a ''real time'' look. (I sure know it's not :P)
Didn't know Sirius had such a small lifespan! Makes sense considering its size! Those blogs of yours are truly inspiring.
Keep up the quality work!
I am not sure whether this a true conformal projection. It was computed as follows
X' = S . X
Y' = S . Y
Z' = 0
where S = R ^ 1.5, and R = sqrt ( X2 + Y2 + Z2) / sqrt (X2 + Y2)
Why power 1.5, well its because if I didn't stars would all appeared clustered around the periphery of the projection. This way the density of stars is preserved across the projection.
I see! Thanks for the detailed info! So you basically created your own projection. I really love this software you're using!
Yeh you can do virtually anything with the built-in Python scripting engine. I used Blender Python to read in the X,Y,Z coords from a file and did the above transformation.
Where did you get the X,Y,Z coords? Observations through some sort of software or available values somewhere on the net?
Actually, I took the list of X,Y,Z from my first reference. But I could have calculated them using Right Ascension, Declination and Distance from one the available catalogs which can be downloaded in column delimited formatted.