NAM logo, by David Le Conte

A relativistic interstellar travel simulation

C.J. Baddiley

A program was written some years ago for educational purposes to illustrate relativistic interstellar travel. This program accesses a 1/4 million star data base, and can display 180 degree forward and aft split screen views of the star fields in passing, in near true colour. The program performs the relativistic transforms for interstellar travel at constant acceleration, from any star and to any other star in the data base.

A journey from the Sun to eta Canis Major is shown, for near 1 g acceleration (1 light-year/year²). There is acceleration for 8 years, and deceleration for another 8, covering a distance of 2500 light years. When given as a slide show, a space time diagram is used to explain this, invoking the "twin paradox" for return journey.

Stellar aberration soon dominates, bringing all points well forward in the direction of motion. Stellar nominal Planck spectra are suitably Doppler shifted, showing the remaining luminances left in the visible. At half time, the blue shift of 2000 brings the cosmic background radiation into the visible.

The journey covers about 10% of the Milky Way galaxy, and the data base becomes rather deplete from such a distant location. The destination is safe orbit about eta Canis major.

All programs were written in basic and run on an A5000 computer.

Maintained by Ian Howarth