On Thu, 01 Feb 2007 05:59:27 -0600, wrote:

On Feb 1, 6:29 pm, "Larry G." wrote:
The other night, I fired up an old copy of Distant Suns 5.1.
I was playing around with the settings, when I started noticing
a few interesting phenomena, when I turned off most of the stars,
and looked at the whole hemisphere at a time.

1. Most of the comets (of the six or eight default loaded)
seem to orbit within 10-20 degrees of the Milky Way.

That seems odd. I would suspect that the periodic ones would be
orbiting near the ecliptic. The C/ ones I would expect to be randomly
distributed. Certainly the notable C/2006 P1 doesn't appear to be
aligned to either ecliptic or Milky Way.

Yes, there was one or two that weren't obviously aligned.
If I had been thinking, I would have turned on the orbit
path visibility to see what sort of alignment was actually there.


2. The galaxies of Virgo, Coma B. and Canes V. seemed to
form a separate disc, similar to our Milky Way.

Well they are collectively the Virgo cluster. The specific shape might
be an artifact of the projection method the software is using.

I had the FOV zoomed out to see an entire hemisphere at a time.
I could rotate the FOV and the clumpy/disc-band pattern
remained consistent.

Perhaps the Virgo cluster is aligned along a more-or-less
linear boundary between two or three different void-bubbles
in the cosmic foam.


3. And there were vast streches of sky in which there were
relatively few cataloged galaxies. This echoes the findings
of a cosmological "foam" structure to the distribution of matter
on a very large scale.

Do you know what database the software is using? NGC + IC

Yes, I believe these are part of Distant Suns 5.1.

Cheers,
Larry G.

Bill



cheers,
Larry G.

--
Your mind is a terrible thing to waste - TURN OFF YOUR TV!

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