Interstellar distance charts

[jude_rook]

I thought it would be fun to select some stars that are among the likeliest to have habitable planets, look at the stars nearest them and do up some distance charts, so that anyone who wanted to use these local areas as a setting would have an idea, once they’d decided how their characters were going to travel, of how long it would take to get from point A to point B.  (And if anyone reading this does want to use them, feel free.)  Note that these stars could be used for the home bases of alien species that we’re going to run into, or for human colony planets that start to build their own political entities, or anything else that might strike your imagination.  I’m just going to call these realms “empires” for the sake of convenience, but of course they could have whatever form of government (or lack of same) tickles your fancy.

To start with, I’ve done a distance chart for Sol, showing how far apart each of the stars within a 10 light-year radius are from each other.  Those stars are:

• Alpha Centauri A and B, and Proxima Centauri/Gliese 559: 4.4 light years from Sol, class G2V, K1V and M5V
• Barnard's Star/Gliese 699: 5.9 light years from Sol, class M4V
• Wolf 359/Gliese 406: 7.8 light years from Sol, class M6V
• Lalande 21185/Gliese 411: 8.3 light years from Sol, class M2V
• Luyten 726-8 A and B/Gliese 65: 8.6 light years from Sol, class M5V and M6V
• Sirius A and B/Gliese 244: 8.6 light years from Sol, class A1V and DA2
• Ross 154/Gliese 729: 9.7 light years from Sol, class M3.5V

For the purposes of this exercise, I’m treating multiple-star systems such as Alpha/Proxima Centauri as single entities.  Also, to save space on the chart, I’m using the stars’ Gliese numbers instead of their more familiar names or catalogue numbers.

Here’s the chart:

	559	699	406	411	65	244	729
Sol	4.4	5.9	7.8	8.3	8.6	8.6	9.7
559	-	6.5	8.3	10.4	10.3	9.6	8.1
699		-	11.0	10.9	12.3	14.4	5.6
406			-	4.0	15.3	9.0	15.1
411				-	15.9	10.9	16.0
65					-	10.2	13.2
244						-	17.2

If you go across the second row, you can see how far Sol is from each of the other stars.  The third row shows how far the Alpha Centauri (559) system is from each (except Sol, since I’m avoiding duplicate entries.)  And so on.

Why only 10 light years?  Frankly, if I went out to just 12.5 light years from Sol, the number of stars would triple, and the chart would become unwieldy.  If I were using this chart as background material for a story where we’ve spread out to the nearest stars, I would probably add the most sunlike stars that are just outside  the 10-light-year range, such as Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, and Epsilon Indi.  Here’s info on how to do that yourself: http://jude-rook.dreamwidth.org/10345.html

Tomorrow: our first nearby empire.