Seeing as the last news post I made is now about two and a half months old, I thought I'd make a new one. Again, I don't particularly see much chance of this becoming a runaway success in terms of readership, but then again, who knows. One thing that I've found rather enjoyable as of late is a program by the name of Celestia.

For those who are unaware of its existence, the raison d'être of this program is to allow the user to explore known space in the Galaxy. With the right add-ons, you can access in the region of 2,000,000 stars and various other spatial phenomena. Thankfully, however, the program is incredibly easy to alter in terms of adding new features; any basic word program will suffice herefor.

One thing that I've been toying with as of late is the creation of Dyson Swarms . Anyone reading this may have heard of its slightly more famous cousin the Dyson Sphere. However, in all likelihood, as the Wikipedia article points out, such a structure would be beset with all kinds of problems, the least of which not being the possibility of the whole structure colliding with its parent star. However, the Dyson Swarm, basically a massive collection of much smaller orbiting bodies, is more feasible, although still well beyond current human technology.

After some experimentation, I've been able to create two sets of Dyson Swarms around two stars in our galaxy: HIP 71860 and Antares. I thought I'd just post a picture of one of them just to show what the structure looks like when it's completed.

For the sense of scale here, each one of the small dots (the solar collectors comprising the swarm) is about larger than Jupiter. In total, there are 2,424 collectors, thus ensuring the continuation of this sphere like structure. However, when viewing in Celestia itself, you need to deactivate both the planet names and orbits from being shown. The names alone will cover the entire structure, thus making it all but invisible simply by virtue of the sheer quantity thereof. Likewise, the orbits need to be turned off if you want smooth operation when viewing it at a higher speed. Having to show the orbits of over 2,000 bodies in the same relatively small area of space is challenging for any computer.

If you're interested in how it's done, leave a message and I'll fill in the rest of the details; it's surprisingly easy to do once you learn the basics of orbital mechanics, which again, can be found on Wikipedia.