Tonight, after hearing that the skies will finally be clearing up after days of being overcast, I plan to step outside and do a little late-winter evening star-gazing. I already know what to expect: the same constellations with their same configurations and the same stars, the brightest of which I know the names. Yes, there will be Orion, with its famous "Belt" of three stars in the middle and the bright stars of Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Bellatrix. North and a little to the west a lies the house-shaped (if you "connect" the stars like the old connect-the-dot puzzles) Auriga, with Capella being the standout star. West of Orion and south of Auriga is Taurus of the Zodiac, Aldebaran its bright star and the famous Pleiades cluster further west. The Zodiac extends eastward with Gemini (containing the "twin" stars Castor and Pollux), the faint Cancer, then Leo with its bright star Regulus...and then on to Virgo toward the eastern horizon. The planet Jupiter will be shining bright, just about between Leo and Virgo. The "dog stars" of Sirius (in Canis Major and the brightest star of the night sky) and Procyon (in Canis Major) will dominate the southern sky...they lie east of Orion. And the Big Dipper, an asterism that is part of the constellation Ursa Major, will be to the right of the North Star (Polaris), with its handle on the bottom and the dipper on top. Yes, I know the arrangement of stars in the night sky quite well...I learned it back in 1964 when I was seven years old. Well, I think it's about time to expand my map into the third dimension...
Stars that appear close together in the sky are in all probability vastly distant from each other...one may be relatively close to us, like Sirius at 8.6 light-years, while "nearby" stars like Betelgeuse and Rigel are each around 1,400 light-years away. What I want is a three-dimensional map of space that I can step into and see the sky from the point at which I am standing. So, for example, I might just want to see how different the stars look from the vantage point of Sirius, so I walk to where it is on my 3-D map...and look around me. Doubtless some stars, like Betelgeuse and Rigel, would be just as bright, but other stars might dim or get brighter. And some may disappear while others become prominent. And the constellations themselves might change a bit in their shapes. Also, I would of course see our own Sun, which would be located at the diametrically opposite part of the sky that we see Sirius in...
A real three-dimensional space map is probably too unwieldy to construct, but with our virtual reality technology on the advance, it should be quite feasible to duplicate it in virtual space. I wonder whether such maps exist yet...if and when they do, I definitely want to be in on it...