Time Immortal

Just as a follow-up on this article, I downloaded a program called Celestia, and while it’s probably not 100% accurate, it does offer a fairly decent ability to simulate…well…a particular issue that was raised concerning the identity of the planet that was discovered at the end of the mid-season cliffhanger of Battlestar Galactica, a planet that is supposedly Earth.

Here’s the constellation Orion, as viewed from Earth (more or less). The stars highlighted in green are the component stars of Orion, while the star selected in red is Muliphein (Gamma Canis Majoris), a bright giant star situated just over 400 light years from Earth.

Looks pretty normal, eh? Now let’s look at Orion from nearby Alpha Centauri.

As the Reader can hopefully see, the alignment of the stars is nearly identical. For good measure, let’s look at Orion from one other nearby star, Tau Ceti.

And here again, Orion is nearly the same as would be seen from Earth…this despite the fact that Tau Ceti is just shy of twelve light years away from us.

Now, to hammer the point home, let’s take a look at Orion from Muliphein, which isn’t anywhere near as close to us, but not all that far when compared to the distances mentioned in BSG.

I can’t actually fit all of Orion’s stars into the frame of the picture, so spread out have they become. And the shape? Forget about it; from this frame of reference, Orion is no more. But hopefully the Reader can see that constellations are not a great way to mark a planet’s location, especially if one isn’t working from the most accurate data set to begin with.

Now, just to prove that I’m not using a biased sample here, let’s try the same experiment with a more complex constellation (and one that’s relevant to BSG as well): Capricorn. Here’s the view from Earth (this time, I managed to frame Earth in the shot as well).
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