From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Sat May 31 2003 - 07:52:12 MDT
In a message dated 5/31/2003 4:51:07 AM Central Standard Time,
asa@nada.kth.se writes: I like playing around with datasets like this, there is so much to
find. Not to mention where to go later - I really want to check out the Orion
complex and the nebulas of the Sagittarius arm in person.
Anders,
You sure are on a painful subject. In the winter 1979-80 I was
wondering what our immediate interstellar neighborhood looked like. It eventually
occured to me that the SF stories often depicted spaceships as having not
windows but viewscreens -- oh, that is a computer monitor. Then I decided an
asterisk would make a perfectly good star.
My local library supplied the bearings and distance to what the book
said was the nearest 25 stars. One xerox copy of a page later I was in
business.
I did a model of our star neighborhood that could be rotated and also
that I could "drive" through. I took my memories of walking railroad tracks
as a boy and designed in 4' per half mile as my paralax correction -- that is
probably wrong but it was a start. I worked all day and into the evening on an
old Trash 80 packing, I believe, 8 k in core and using a cassette tape
recorder for memory storage.
Guys I had a simulated space ship that could be drove through our
neighborhood but I needed to displace myself off that center line through the sun.
That was a problem for another day so I decided to save and shut down
for the evening. I punched the wrong button while saving and lost the entire
program. To this day, 23 years later, I have never had the heart to redo that
job. That is why this is a painful subject. <G> Thanks, Anders.
Ron h.
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