3D Astrocartography...

[penemue]

http://www.cthulhurising.co.uk/astro-cartography.php
Looks interesting. I had no idea this even existed. I was looking for 3D star charts.

[Nyrath]

I have found that maps like that are showy, but not useful to a game master.
If you are actually trying to find the distances between star A and star B, they are not much help.

The high-powered way to deal with this problem is to spend the money for AstroSynthesis (http://www.nbos.com/products/astro/astro.htm)

I've got a few maps that might prove useful.
http://www.projectrho.com/smap12.html#winch

[austenandrews]

They look pretty cool for visualization purposes, though.

[Cancer]

Yeah, what you really need for that kind of stuff is a true 3-D display unit, the classic holotank or some such. With very sparse charts like star maps, you don't have enough information for your subconscious perspective-vision processor to kick in. I looked at trying to make charts like that about 10-12 years back when the HIPPARCOS data became available, and never found anything I liked, so I settled for just doing flat map star charts drawn for different points in space.

[Nyrath]

The good thing about AstroSynthesis is that you can rotate the map with your computer mouse. You can also filter by distance or several other attributes. You can even make a fly-through movie and save it as an AVI file.

So it isn't a holographic unit, but it's not a static map either.

[Nolgroth]

Another (free) program is It's Full of Stars (http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/7472/ifosweb/index.htm). Probably not as outright useful as Astrosynthesis, but I like it. And other is ChView (http://members.nova.org/%7Esol/chview/). A little more colorful than IFOS, but I find it overall less useful. Both of these programs are fairly old, but they do what I want them to.

Always looking for low cost alternatives whenever possible. I would like to actually use Astrosynthesis, but right now it would have limited use to my game. For the price, it is just not worth it as a game aid.

[austenandrews]

3D glasses. It's the only way to be sure.

[penemue]

I like the pretty maps.

[Adventus]

Here is a free Program that lets zoom from a galatic view to a space shuttle without losing detail.

Celestia. (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html)

This thing is awesome. Make sure you check out the add ons!

[penemue]

Celestia is fun to play with. Thanks.. repped.

[Nolgroth]

Here is a free Program that lets zoom from a galatic view to a space shuttle without losing detail.

Celestia. (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html)

This thing is awesome. Make sure you check out the add ons!Celestia is awesome. I've played with it a great deal. My only "complaint" is that I cannot create a "sector" (or something) on the fly. I believe that it is possible to manually edit some sort of data file, but that gets boring quick.

So says Captain Attention Spa....what was I saying?

[Kraven Kor]

Heh, I remember the last time I looked into this here, Nyrath had used a graphing program to create his own star maps :D

I still have the maps he sent me.