to which star system the heroes of Prometheus were invited

The System was the Zeta Reticuli System, however that Star Chart is Incorrect as the Reticulum Constellation would NOT be Located where LV-223 was shown.

If we go by the Map that Holloway Pointed to then LV-223 is Located Bellow Gemini

 There is a Margin of Error with THIS though as the Sky Map in Prometheus is NOT exactly Accurate.

An interesting fact is that all the prominent features of the Orion constellation are very far away from Earth, many hundreds or indeed thousands of light years distant. This being the case, you could travel a fair number of light years from Earth and Orion would still look broadly the same as it does from here. But other nearby stars (such as Zeta Reticuli at a mere 39 ly) would appear to be in wildly different parts of the sky.

Therefore, if one is being charitable, you could make the case that the starchart being displayed on the Prometheus is being shown from some distant reference point. Who can say where that reference point is; it certainly doesn't have to be Earth or indeed where the Prometheus is currently located. You could very likely find a distant reference vantage point where Zeta Reticuli would appear in the sky as it does on the Prometheus starchart.

OK, I'm being charitable. But what I can't forgive is the script in Covenant, where the computer describes the origin of David's transmission as having a "Right Ascension of 47.6 and a Declension of 24.3 from our current location". This is just daft gobbledegook. For a start, astronomical coordinates have a Declination, not a declension. Declension is a grammatical term. Further, Right Ascension and Declination coordinates are centred on planet Earth, not from an arbitrary location in space. Slapdash!

hox

Excellent point about astronomy in Covenant!

I'm glad you pointed it out, as it saves me and other writers from making such an embarrassing mistake in the future.

I and others strive to get details Correct to the best of our ability, and knowing this is 'wrong' shows me for example that I need to learn how astronomical navigation would be done from a starship...or figure out something Plausible based off real science.

It hasn't come up in my works yet, but it'd be nice to have it worked out and at-hand.

BWW, in the extreme distances of deep space you will always need 3 coordinates to describe where you are. Everything else is just a line-of-sight description centred on an observation point. For example, let’s say you are in a lighthouse. The beam sweeps around and lights up an aircraft. The sweep angle is one coordinate, and if you tilt the light to hit the aircraft spot on, that’s another. You’ve got two angles (called azimuth and altitude).

To pin down the aircraft properly, you also need to know how far away it is. That gives you a third coordinate.

Trouble is, that coordinate system is centred on the lighthouse and wouldn’t be much use to an interstellar traveller.

There is a defined coordinate system called Galactic Coordinates, but be careful. It is centred on the Sun, and has nothing to say about how far away something is. A bit like the lighthouse coordinates, with the lighthouse shifted to the Sun (and no distance). It’s not a bad starting point, though. With two angles alpha and beta, add a distance to that and you can pin down the location of something anywhere in the galaxy with those three numbers. And with that coordinate system (let’s call it XNAV).

Why did I call it XNAV? Because that’s how future space travellers will navigate! What am I talking about, I hear you ask. Well... you know we have a bunch of satellites above us beaming down signals so that your phone knows where it is? In interstellar space there are loads of pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars) that beam out pulses of x-rays. Some spin a few times a second, and others spin hundreds of times a second. Here’s the neat bit: they spin so regularly they are like ultra-accurate atomic clocks. Some clever boffins have figured out that if you made a “GPS” receiver in interstellar space that listens out for pulsar signals, you would be able to work out your exact position in the Galaxy accurate to thirty metres. Which is pretty incredible when you think how stupendously big the Galaxy is.

See Pulsar Positioning System.

hox in the novelization by ADF it is declination not declension.

I believe the script used the correct word but Ricks got it wrong.

Certainly Hox ;)

The Star Charts we use on EARTH are from our Perspective and so if you say Traveled to say Sirius then HOW the Constellations look from Earth would be DIFFERENT from Sirius System.   So indeed the with Holloway and his Star Map this could be the View from another Location but NOT taken from Earth.

But the Zeta Reticuli System should still NOT appear below Gemini well to that Area to the Left of Orion....  But Sci-Fi does make Mistakes.

Regarding the OT then despite that Error, it seems that they WISH to indicate to us that LV-223 is located in the Zeta Reticuli Binary System

Regarding Ricks and Alien Covenant they maybe taking the Co-Ordinates from the Current Location of the Covenant at that Time, but i bet its NOT Scientifically Accurate.

hox

Thank-You for the info!! VERY useful!!

A thought, and BTW I looked up the Pulsar GPS method, and it is VERY clever...yet doesn't take into account intra-galactic motion of, well...everything is moving.

That however is a minor point and easily factored in based on average galactic movement.

What if you based all nav-points from Galactic Center, then applied the Pulsar GPS?
The emissions from the hypermassive black hole at Galactic core make it a super-lighthouse to gain a Primary Fix from it seems to me.

Or did I miss something?
I am experiencing memory-slips, and thus that IS something I must factor in to anything I do/say...annoying, but such is how it is for me right now.

after all, you can definitely see that it is not the Reticula system because there is only a star system below canis minor or gemini. maybe it was invented for the movie that there are 6 little stars there, or maybe they are just hard to find. only at the end of the movie may they fly to the Reticuli system to planet 4.

BWW, yes certainly the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy could certainly be a useful reference point. I touted the use of Galactic Coordinate because they are already  established and Sun-centric, which puts our home in a "special place". If you picked the centre of the galaxy as a reference point instead of the Sun, you would still be tasked with the problem of defining where the 12 O'clock position of the galactic plane should start (think of a clock dial with no numbers). Of course, the Sun is a very special place to humans, so its position in the Galaxy would be a good direction to use for that purpose! In which case, just sticking with the Sun-centric Galactic Coordinates is just as good.

The Engineers would have a similar choice to make. They could use the supermassive black hole at the galactic centre as the origin of their coordinate system. They would undoubtedly use the plane of the Galaxy as a reference (because that's easily measurable), but where would they put 12 O'clock on the dial? Why, pointing to their home world, of course!

SuperAlien, it was the computer that got the "declension" dialogue wrong (Ricks talked about other matters). In which case, shame on the producers for not correcting the computer dialogue!

To wich star system went to Covenant ? Anyone guess what Constelation is IT?

Unknown. It was an uncharted system that they came across during the journey to Origae-6. And as to where Origae-6 is located, that's another question... May be a corruption of the constellation Auriga.

hox

You make good-points about 'Sun-Centric' and they are logical, practical I admit.

But, in the questing for a truly 'Baseline Universal' standard, I'd like to ask your opinion on the following:

1; Base Center is the Hypermassive Black Hole
2; The Starting Reference (12 o' clock) is the fastest rotating Pulsar in the galaxy.

This is a point for me because while solar-centric makes absolute sense as I conceded above, my Chimerans do not think like Humans or Engineers, and are developing/coming to understand their own cultural and psychological customs which affects their choice and use of solar-centrism as much as psychological customs do Humanity's and the Engineer's choices in doing so.
They have no current Home System, they reside in the Lakota system in the Hyades but to them they are 'guests' while searching for a system to claim as their own home...thus trying to base things off the Lakota system's star would feel too much to them as 'wrongful claiming'.

They would want a Universal Baseline Standard as a hedge in case starships get lost due to nav errors or whatever comes up.
This way, even if a starship suffers a complete and absolute erasure of all it's charts and nav data, that data base can be easily rebuilt using ship sensors and the Universal Baseline Navigational Reference.
As well, it makes it easier to translate nav databases collected from, say Engineer or other being's nav systems and charts.

Sounds perfectly logical to me, BWW. If you're looking for a reference frame that is independent of any particular culture, I'd say that's a sound choice. Go for it!

NB, for interested readers of this thread, I came across a very neat website today. It shows a 3D map of a huge number of stars. If you find a star of interest, you can click on its name to see its info. Then when you click the return button, the 3D map is centred on the star you looked at. You can then spin the view around, and zoom in and out. It's a great way to see how the appearance of stars in the sky truly depends on where you're looking from.

Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to search for stars by name (e.g. Zeta 2 Reticuli).

Maybe Big Dave has a few days spare to hunt it down, and show how the stars would appear from there!

100,000 Stars

hox

THANK-YOU for the link to that site....it is AWESOME!! It's an incredible new tool for me to handle research with regarding astronomy and such for my work!!!! :D
(((HUG)))

Ty for telling me what you thought of my idea!! I'll be handing it to my Chimerans, of course, and Ty for being a sounding-board! :)

Hey, no problem. I like thinking about this kind of stuff.

Yes, that site is awesome, isn’t it. There are some real bright sparks at Google. It works really well on an iPad, where you can easily pinch to zoom, and rotate super smoothly. I particularly like how you can zoom right out to see most of the Galaxy and, if you rotate the view to see it edge on, how  thin the galactic plane is, relatively speaking.

hox

So do I, I spend a lot of time thinking about all kinds of sci-fi stuff...kinda self-evident. :D

Been playing with that site and I love it, I really do!!
I have a mouse with adjustable dpi, and whenI run it up to maximum, I get a really fine degree of control...and am hunting for Zeta II Reticuli...I know it's in there somewhere...has to be.

It's very simple. Zeta Reticuli is about 39,5 lightyears away from Sol.

Beteigeuze (upper left star in the Orion constellation) is about 700 lightyears away, Rigel (lower right star in the Orion constellation) is about 800 lightyears away.

In the scene in Prometheus it is shown, that the LV-223 system is way more distant than the stars of the Orion constellation. Moreover Holloway says "[...] that system has a sun" (one star). Zeta Reticuli is a binary star-system (two stars).

This leaves us with two options:

a) LV-223 is not in the same system as LV-426.

b) LV-223 is in the same system as LV-426 - in the Zeta Reticuli system. Then of course the animated star map is wrong (could be that RS just inserted Orion there to give the audience something they know, since Orion is the most known (and arguably the most beautiful) constellation, as well as to give them a feeling of great distance) and Holloways description ("a star") is wrong as well.

I started a topic on this almost 3 years ago.

http://www.alien-covenant.com/topic/47325

There are arguments on both sides (for example a binary star system being the first one to show up as soon as David starts the Engineers' star map hologram and LV-223 being a moon orbiting a gas-giant vs. the things mentioned above, like LV-223 being to far away to be in the Zeta Reticuli system).

I think the most probable answer is, that the writers/RS simply overlooked this or rather didn't know what they were doing.