Battlestar Galactica

Thanks Phil - heres the last post that got nuked

Dave, yea this is the latest one. The description below doesn't give any spoilers I hope but does tell you what to look for.

Seanie - the new version is cool. go download it. It took me a while to get to like it, but once you get used to Starbuck its great!

Hi,

It seems my topic earlier on this was a little too obscure and the mods got rid of it. But I was posting about astronomy! Honest! Let me explain. Hopefully without spoilers!

At a certain point in this weekends episode you see some ships 'jump' into an areas of space. The goal of all the ships is to find Earth but so far they have not had much luck. Trust me the plot is much better than that!

Anyway this week the ships jump in and instead of the usual apparent random scattering of stars we have the very recognisable pattern of Orion. This isn't commented on in any dialogue but its a nice clue to those who recognise the odd constellation. The camera then pans up and you can see Taurus and looking at the still you can see that most of the stars in the area do match with reality.

This however leads to another question. If they see the stars as we do, how close are they to Earth? Sure they can see Orion and Taurus but that only shows that they are on the same line of sight.

It turns out that parallax comes to help. Two of the stars in the field are relatively close to us. Aldebaran at 65 ly and Pi3 Orion (one of the bow stars) at 26ly.

Now if you have your spaceship pointing at orion and put it in reverse these two stars very quickly start to loose their apparent position. Even at 5 light years out they are very far from where they should be. Actually even at 1ly they are obviously 'off'.

Thanks to it being hard to accurately measure angles on a TV screen its hard to say exactly whether they are in the inner solar system or not. But even allowing for a bit of error in the TV stills the location has to be within ~400au. So we can be fairly sure that the fleet of ships jumped into the solar system and so would know where Earth is.

Nice touch by the directors to put something like that in for the astro-geeks in the audience! And we're all cylons anyway

Maybe you should use Starry night and fly around the place to see just how far
is too far!

It's pretty far!

Maybe you should use Starry night and fly around the place to see just how far
is too far!

It's pretty far!

:lol:

Maybe you should use Starry night and fly around the place to see just how far
is too far!

It's pretty far!

Thats where my lunch break went today :lol:

400au, surely the sun is kinda obvious and oh look, some nice big planets and whats this high frequency transmission they say to themselves as they tune into Jerry Springer. :lol:

IIRC in the original series "The night the Cylons landed" they more crash than land on the outskirts of Los Angeles and have to hitch a ride to the city. They end up sharing a cab with DJ Wolf-Man Jack (in a cameo appearance!) and end up at a fancy-dress party. There might be wierder ways of invading a planet... but I can't think of any!!

Good old fashioned 1970's felgercarb!

Phil.

PS - Jerry Springer was still a pimply faced youth back then!