Lit The Essential Atlas and Galactic Cartography: Official Discussion

I am really bad at keeping track of changes, as I'm, well, pretty lax when it comes to the map (and you could say "chaotic", even). It's odd, considering how obnoxiously anal I usually am about version control both at work and with other fan project... but for some reason I can't bring myself to do it with the galaxy map. I just get lost on it and then suddenly, whoops, eight hours have passed and I have no idea what I've been doing. Jason, take the wheel.

But I actually started forcing myself to keep track of changes with this version! I only added a handful of worlds (detailed in the follow-up tweet) but I thought it was worth the upload, as it includes some worlds I would consider very important to Star Wars history, like Dromund Kaas.

 

We have a new MAP! It's a MAP!

High Republic Chronicles of the Jedi features a galaxy map spread!!!

Interesting placements and Nihil territory marked!

Did I say MAP yet?

 

Check my twitter



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As a longtime fan of the 80s sitcom "Mama's Family" it gives me no end of satisfaction and amusement that there is a planet in Star Wars named "Vint."

 

I still want to know where No-Space is... and if its neighbor Otherspace is mappeable, too.

 

It's been a while, but here's a new version of my galaxy map.



This new version has around 50 new systems from the EU, taken from secondary maps from the Atlas, from the sector maps from the Atlas appendix, and even from the map of the Pius Dea Crusades found in the Essential Guide to Warfare.

 

In Legends, at the end of ESB the Rebel fleet is stated to be in the Haven system, which is somewhat south of Dagobah. Dagobah is at M-19 on this picture of the galactic map. I dunno, from the ending shots of ESB it looks like they're waaayyy further out than that.

 

That is not the home galaxy Luke and Leia are looking at in ESB.

It is usually thought to be one of the satellite galaxies that are "relatively" close to the SW Galaxy.

I've even heard it suggested it's the Rishi Maze.

Regardless of what is might be, from early on, it was considered to NOT be the Star Wars home galaxy.

 

So the shot is looking outwards at a neighboring galaxy? Hmm. Wouldn't the protostar explanation have been a simpler retcon?

 

Apparently as early as 2003, Leland Chee said it was the home galaxy:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_galaxy/Legends

The Empire Strikes Back debate

At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, characters aboard the Rebel fleet see a celestial object from some distance away. Some fans have said that it rotates too fast to be a galaxy and at that distance a galaxy would not emit as much light as is portrayed in the film.

Some sources have said that the fleet spent some time hiding outside the galactic disk, probably intending to refer to this scene.[3] According to the 1996 Tales of the Bounty Hunters story Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Zuckuss and 4-LOM, the object in the film is the galaxy, and the Rebel fleet had journeyed to a point in space far removed from the galactic plane.[51] This point was not outside of the galactic plane, per se, but rather above the galactic plane.

Since the release of Tales of the Bounty Hunters, the object has been inconsistently identified. The Complete Star Wars Trilogy Scrapbook, first released in 1997, identifies the object as a spinning star formation. In 2002, the Episode II DVD-ROM Exclusive Content stated that the bright object may be the cluster known as the Rishi Maze. In 2003, Leland Chee confirmed on the StarWars.com Message Boards that the object was indeed the Star Wars galaxy,[52] which was reinforced by the release of The Essential Atlas in 2009, which established that the Rebel fleet regrouped at a point above the galactic plane.[3]

 

Thanks for a sources, @Iron_lord.

Well, if Leland said that...

Seconded.

Explain it to us, Leland.
Explain how they can be "above" the galaxy, and they can see the whole galaxy like they are looking at it through a telescope from a completely different galaxy thousands of lightyears away?

It is nice to get answers, but sometimes the answers aren't thought through.

For the Rebel Fleet to be far enough outside the galaxy to even perceive the entirety of it... to be able to look at it completely.

That is WAY WAY far out.

And that runs into other issues with canon, like the galactic barrier, or the trans galactic travel logistics explained for the Vong.

It's one of those "obvious" answers which smacks of "don't think too hard" subtext.

 

Or, they're not seeing the whole galaxy - just the core - with the spiral arms being too faint to see clearly from inside a well-lit room.

 

If that were the case, shouldn't the core look much bigger in the ending shots? If we're going by this image, then the core diameter is about half the galaxy's total diameter...and Haven/Dagobah is not far away enough for the galaxy to look the way it does in the ending sequence.

 

As good a guess as any, I suppose. Though that would suggest we should see a tapering to imperceptible that should fill the entire screen. It would also mean they are directly above the core, as it would be the brightest and closest object they are in position to.

The satellite galaxy excuse was more flexible.

 

Honestly, I was always just an advocate for the "star formation" view. It looks a lot closer to that than to a galaxy, to me.

 

The theory I like is that it's a protostar in some unspecified location within the galaxy. Going by @Iron_lord's post here, that's actually what it is in canon.

In Legends, is "Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Zuckuss and 4-LOM" the only story that mentions the location of the Rebel rendezvous point? Could the location be retconned or headcanon'ed into something else without mangling the continuity?

 

The Core looks to me to be about 1/3 of the galaxy's total diameter - and the Deep Core looks around 1/3 of the width of the Core. In the context of the Legendsverse, it didn't break my suspension of belief to assume the spiral arms were faint in that shot.

The scene in question:

4-LOM flew the Mist Hunter out of the galaxy at a point near the galactic equatorial plane, and he used the massive gravitational forces of the galaxy itself to propel the ship toward the rendezvous point.
Which was almost exactly where Zuckuss had intuitively known it would be.
The exact point was two degrees off. Soon, from their pilots’ chairs, 4-LOM and Toryn saw the scattering of lights that was the Rebel fleet.
Or what was left of it.
Seeing it lifted Toryn’s spirits. She looked from the fleet to the galaxy below, and thought how her future was bright again. The Rebellion was not ended. It still had an army, reduced though it might be.

 

You make a mistake in assuming that Haven and Dagobah are relatively close to each other. You link to the wook says that the coordinates for Haven are 2.427,3.886,673.52 (I don't know what the source is . So if you drew a line on the map from where Coruscant (0,0,0) is shown to where Haven is shown, that would be a distance of 4.582 (I don't know the units). But that only accounts for the distance in a "plan view." If you considered Coruscant to be "on the page", Haven would be "above the page" by 147 times that distance! Dagobah is almost certainly within the thin disk, which is plus/minus about 1,000 light years from the plane of the ecliptic. The galactic diameter (luminous disk) is about 100,000 light years across. So it is hard to imagine that the distance from Coruscant to Dagobah is less than 25,000 light years, which means that the z-coordinate of Dagobah is likely less than 0.5. So Haven is MUCH farther from Dagobah, than Dagobah is from Coruscant.
Now does that location correlate to the angle the galaxy is being viewed from? And is that distance adequate for that view to make sense? I don't know, but I kind of doubt it.

 

I have an idea, what if this "galaxy" nebula, protostar thing you see at the end of TESB is a galaxy, but you do NOT see the entire galaxy, this is only a portion of it and the void between it and where you are currently with the fleet above the plane is simply part of the emptier space between the brightly lit spiral arms of a galaxy. Hence the galaxy is much larger and has space behind you covered, but you are in the void in between and above the plane.

 

Huh, so if that's an x-y-z coordinate system, then Luke and Leia at the end should be looking at the galaxy from the "top" down, rather than from the "side". So either that's not an x-y-z coordinate, or...that's not the home galaxy they're looking at.