![]() Note that the brightest nighttime star, Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris), also has a planetary system whose members served as settings for stories, but only in Star Trek books or video games. Its first task is to survey the inhabited planet Alpha Carinae II. The device can control the ship with some 5 percent of its normal crew. It featured in The Original Series episode “The Ultimate Computer.” In the episode, which takes place in 2268, the scientist Richard Daystrom installs a tactical computer aboard the Enterprise. Shining at magnitude –0.7, it’s the second-brightest star in our night sky. The brightest star visited by any Star Trek crew on television or film is Canopus (Alpha Carinae), which observers can spot from the southernmost states. This triple star, also known as Keid and 40 Eri, is some 16.3 light-years from Earth. And Epsilon Eri is only 10.5 light-years away.Ĭurrent Trek star maps place Vulcan in the Omicron 2 (ο 2) Eridani system. During an episode of Enterprise, however, Chief Engineer Tucker states that Vulcan is 16 light-years from Earth. Early on, some official reference books listed magnitude 3.7 Epsilon (ε) Eridani as the star around which it orbited. Indeed, with all the recent exoplanet discoveries, it’s not hard to imagine that an alien civilization might exist where no one has gone before, on a planet revolving around one of the stars of Star Trek.īesides Earth, probably the most important planet in Star Trek is Vulcan, homeworld of Mr. ![]() The next time you look at one of these stars, let your mind drift back to 1966, when people - through their television sets - voyaged to distant worlds. What follows is a list that combines some of the brightest stars in our sky with several not-so-bright ones, all of them important in the Star Trek universe. But I wondered how many of those destinations were placed in a star system visible in our sky. Of course, each one originated in some writer’s imagination. This groundbreaking television show was followed by Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), Star Trek: Voyager (1995), Star Trek: Enterprise (2001), Star Trek: Discovery (2017), and Star Trek: Picard (2020), along with various movies, animated series, and lots of books and comics.ĭuring the five and a half decades that followed the first show, now often referred to as The Original Series, the Enterprise has visited hundreds of planets. ![]() Others may have been influenced by The Twilight Zone (1959), Lost in Space (1965), or The Invaders (1967).īy far, however, the TV show that gave the most astronomy buffs their start exploring space was Star Trek, which began a three-season run at 8:30 P.M. For some - like me - it was The Outer Limits, which had a brief run starting in 1963. Many readers of Astronomy can point back to televised science fiction as their first introduction to the universe.
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