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.


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.


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

Bill



cheers,
Larry G.

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

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