I solve the problem by creating maps on about eight different scales. But I do think that is probably on the edge of unfathomable.

And a Star Trek map superimposed on the local galaxy:

gruze.org/galaxymap/st...

More maps of the real Milky Way for those who are interested.

gruze.org/posters_2024/

Star Trek has gotten the distances to a few local stars approximately right, the distances to many other stars quite wrong, and has largely ignored real star clusters and nebulae. I would love to see more of the real Milky Way in Star Trek, but that would require the writers and producers to care.

If Star Trek wanted to refer to more local structures within the Local Bubble it could refer to the Hyades, the Coma open cluster, the Ursa Major moving group or the Tucana-Horologium association. But sadly so far as I know it never has.

The Eagle nebula lies at a distance of about 1800 parsecs away. The Carina nebula lies about 2400 parsecs away. Both in the inner galaxy.

The answer is easy. All the major Star Trek political structures (Federation, Klingon Empire, Romulan Star Empire and Cardassians) lie within some 100 or so parsecs away from the Sun within the Local Bubble. The famous nebulae (regions of ionized hydrogen) all lie much much further away.

I never use the discover feed because it includes people I don't follow and often would never want to follow.

I don't understand why Bluesky can't offer such an alternative feed here. It can even default to chronological if that matters to people. But I would almost certainly switch to order by importance.

I think Twitter had some kind of algorithm that attempted to show content from the people I follow by importance and not just chronological order.

Technofascism is a real thing.

I find that I see fewer posts here than I used to on Twitter. Sometimes I wonder what happened to person X, and I visit their profile to see many recent posts, none of which I saw even though I follow them. Presumably a time zone issue.

Tee off at Alpha Centauri, hole in one in the Aquila Rift, hole 18 at Naos.

I can dream.

Would love to get to the point where the Local Bubble region of the Milky Way is so familiar to enough people that @walkaboutminigolf.bsky.social uses it as the theme for a golf course. Right. We have a lot of work to do!

These field trips are becoming increasingly popular, a quick Google suggests. The groups organizing them have the people, I have the astronomy content. It could be a match made in the heavens!

Ok, thanks. This article admits that at the time they did not have the technology to go back that far because of errors in proper motion data. Gaia's new data (especially in the upcoming Gaia DR4) is far more accurate but still, adding in the Milky Way rotation might make the problem too difficult

Or we could go back some 120 million years ago when Sirius B would have been a red giant star instead of the white dwarf it is today. Although where would the Sun have been then? Possibly not so close to Sirius as it is today.

Even today it grates my ears to hear the United States referred to as "America". I assume Busch was subtly playing to that Canadian sense of identity.

In this case we have a galaxy which is essentially half flocculent. The smaller narrow arm is easy to trace as it wraps around the bar. The other arm is a huge sea of chaos with bits of arm segments appearing and disappearing. Could the Milky Way be a bit like that?