[TML] A basic quadrant for review

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 8/31/08 2:43 AM, "Knapp" <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not so sure you are correct about the bottom end. I think, we
> think that because the ones smaller than .1 are so hard to find as you
> move out from sol. It seems that they might be VERY common.

Much below that and you drop into the brown dwarf range.  But it does appear
that red dwarfs and probably brown dwarfs are very common.

> It gives a good difference but it does still indicate that the sizes
> are more similar that what is real. There are a lot of great articles
> on the web about how books for students show data in ways that mislead
> the students.

Oh certainly.  But compromises have to be made.  For instance, if Sol,
Earth, and Earth's orbit are drawn to scale along a piece of paper, Earth
would be 1/1174 of an inch, Sol 1/10.75, and separated by 10 inches.  While
accurate, it isn't very *useful*.  Earth would be a speck that you'd have to
highlight so it wasn't lost as a defect in the paper.  :P

If you don't worry about the orbital distance, you can show their relative
sives as 10 inch vs. 1/11 inch...

Even on my screen, at 1680 pixels apart, Sol would be 15.6 pixels across,
and Earth only 1/7 pixel across.

> In this subsector there are 12 out of 50 that have more than one star.
> By chance they are not in this quadrant. I guess in real life I should
> have more stars that are double or better but they tend to not make
> habitable planet systems so I avoided them in my star maker.

That depends.  Close or far companions aren't too much trouble.  It's just
when the companion is close to the "sweet spot" for life that it screws
things up.  :)

We may have to readjust the probability as we find more red dwarfs, but so
far it looks like only 2/3 of systems are single stars.

> Yes, that is a problem. One possible answer is to just use the big
> star as the background and but the icons on top of it. My look to
> sloppy though. I have to test that out.

If you attempt this, you'll need to highlight anything on top.  The star is
obviously a fairly bright color.  Make the other symbols bright too.  But
have the other symbols outlined by a 1 pixel line of black.  Then when it's
on the black background, the outline is ignored, but when on a star,
contrast is improved.