Pythagoras flight simulator

DESIGN STUDY: design and reference data only, NOT flight-certified. Not connected to any real vehicle or flight system. The flight profile is the speculative Pythagoras Concept Design v2.4 §4.7 profile.

Destination

Time

Route hazards (gas clouds)

Views

Ship's-eye sky view (forward)
Relativistic aberration + Doppler colour
Sky field of view 90° look backward (toward the Sun)

Notes and assumptions

Positions are barycentric ICRS (ly) from the nav package. Between samples the display interpolates linearly; use navref for navigation-quality values.

Aim: the ship flies straight to the target's geometric position at arrival (intercept point). This includes the star's motion and the light-time correction. The target's motion during the flight (hundreds of AU) is far too small to see at this scale and is listed in the readout.

Gas clouds: Redfield & Linsky (2008) clouds on the sight line, projection only: there are no distances to cloud edges, so they are listed, not drawn.

Sky view: Hipparcos (ESA) stars brighter than Hp 6, plus the star-map stars within 50 ly, seen from the ship's current position, so parallax is included.

Aberration uses cosθ' = (cosθ+β)/(1+β cosθ).
Doppler factor δ = γ(1+β cosθ). Colour is a black body at δ·T. T comes from B−V via the Ballesteros 2012 formula, or from a nominal temperature per spectral class.
Black-body colours use the CIE 1931 fit of Wyman et al. 2013.
Brightness is scaled by δ⁴ (bolometric) and clamped for display. This is illustrative: the change in a real visual band depends on each star's spectrum.