Very scary stories told that we have all heard and debunked

[Ninurta]

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A more logical frame of reference for such a map would be in a larger reference system, outside the individual reference frames of the constituent stars. The Galactic coordinate system would fit that bill.

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Speaking of which, do you know how to transpose a lat/long coordinate here on Earth to a celestial coordinate? That possible? Know of any such online star map. I'm no astrophysicist and not even sure if I'm putting the question in correct context.

Thanks!

I think I do. If I understand you correctly, you would like to project the Earth's geographic grid into space to locate stars via the earth lat-long grid. That's implemented in the "equatorial" system. It takes the Earth's equatorial and geographic grid onto the celestial sphere.

There is an astronomical (but free) program called "Stellarium" that you can use to view the sky. It will display both an equatorial and an azimuthal grid projected onto the night sky. The Equatorial grid (Measured in Right Ascention and Declination) is fixed to the sky - a star will not move in reference to it - and the azimuthal grid is tied to the location of the observer on Earth. This means that if the program is sped up, the equatorial grid will appear to move as the Earth rotates, but each star will maintain it's position with respect to the grid. The azimuthal grid does NOT move with the sky (as it is tied to your position on Earth), and the stars will apear to slide along it as the Earth rotates.

There are 24 "hours" of Right Ascention, so each RA zone is 15 degrees wide. Declination is measured in degrees, + or - according to whether they are above or below the celestial equator.

Some background on these coordinate systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_ascension

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial...ate_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomic...te_systems

ETA: to do coordinate conversions between the equatorial and galactic coordinate systems to get the coordinates for the stars in the CNS3 converted to galatic 3D coordinates, I had to teach myself spherical trigonometry, because the university did not offer a class in it. So we set up an independent study for me to research it and teach it to myself, and I got class credit for it even though no such class existed until we set it up. Spherical trigonometry is a bit different from planar trigonometry, because any triangle on the surface of a sphere has corners that add up to 270 degrees rather than the standard 180 degrees of a flat triqangle due to the curvature of the surface it is projected on to. That curvature "opens up" the triangles corners to a wider angle.

Then to get the 3D coordinates, I had to take the converted coordinates and combine them with the distance coordinate to obtain placement coordinates in 3D space - X, Y, and Z coordinatess.

There used to be, and probably still is, a website called something like "3D Starmaps" by Nyrath (real name Winchell Chung) that delved into these conversions some. I myself used FORTRAN on a VAX computer to process the catalog into my coordinate system so that all I had to do after understanding the conversion principles was to write a FORTRAN program to do the conversions for me, then output them to a file. I didn't sit there with a pencil, paper, and a slide rule and do all 3500 or so of them by hand!

ETA2: Nyrath's star mapping website: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/ 

Links to informational pages about the math of it and such are at the bottom of that page. I didn't check this evening, but at one time you could get the CNS3 there as a file you could process on your own. Back in the day, I got it through academic chammels from Gleise and Jahreiss, the authors and compilers of it.

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