I realized it would be very helpful to have a star map for Jump Temp so I started looking for a real map of stars. I ran into Winchell Chung’s HabHYG maps and though, “Perfect!” only I realized his warning about the 30 parsec maps being accurate, that they were unusable due to the number of stars in them. I then realized I needed to reduce the number of inhabited stars in the map but I couldn’t do that without re-drawing the map. I also wanted to indicate where alien worlds were. I resolved to re-draw the map for myself. Which proved to be far harder than I thought, which is saying something because I thought it would be pretty difficult.
I ended up getting a new web server running (my old development one died a bit ago) and fired up the ol’ PHP code to read the HabHYG dataset and draw the maps for me. I’m very happy with the results even though there’s a lot of crowding going on. I’ve never used PHP to create an image so this was really new to me. It took way less time than I thought it would. The above picture is the central region, about 15 parsecs square.
I still can’t show the whole map in one image. If I make the text bigger, the stars start to crowd each other so I split the map into regions.
Thanks to Winchell for the dataset!