Help me rationalize the Earth "gotcha"

Television, Movies Games and Books BSG-2003
#1

From the map room on Kobol, we saw our constellations. As the fleet got closer to Cylon earth, the constellations started appearing around the fleet (gaeta was too busy seething to run matches for constellations at these moments i guess)

when they get to cylon earth the constellations match what we saw in the map room. so somewhere theres a habitable planet, with star patterns that match ours to an uncanny degree.

I know logically its because the writers didn’t plan to fake us out back when they wrote the map room. But this is as close as i can get to an in show explanation.

Cylon earth was orbiting one of the centauris. This would sort of work because even though constellations immediately start to drift once you start moving, from the centauris they are still somewhat recognizable. Also assuming if they were plotting the constellations from memory, and gaeta was accounting for drift over time, he saw what was more or less a match for the constellations.

The reason the 13th tribe didn’t spread out to one system over and colonize Our earth as well? They didn’t have jump drives so it would still have been quite a shlep for them, perhaps they hadn’t reached the point where they needed to look yet.

thats what i’ve got. is that buyable?

hopefully its more believable then us having to believe that the colonials had an amalgam of greek and roman religion, which they abandoned for some 150,000 years, which the greeks reinvented, and then the romans copied and used the rest of the colonial gods names.

#2

“All visible constellations match.” was what Gaeta said. So they have some degree of wiggle room there.

The reason the 13th tribe didn’t spread out to one system over and colonize Our earth as well? They didn’t have jump drives so it would still have been quite a shlep for them, perhaps they hadn’t reached the point where they needed to look yet.

thats what i’ve got. is that buyable?

Yup. The story of the Final Five was that they didn’t have FTL, so their trip to the colonies took a while.

#3

Personally, I’m not sure why they reference constellations at all with verifying their location. Constellations are only apparently from the surface of the planet.

#4

I was under the impression that they were supposed to be led back to Erf, but it was uninhabitable, and that it’s Kara’s guidance that got them to a habitable planet in spite of it.

#5

This is incorrect.

As for the visible constellations being a match quibble, it would still impossible for just a few constellations to be a match unless you did something like moved directly toward a single constellation, and had another directly behind you. then those two would still match. but gaeta would have had to have been very sloppy if that were the case.

I’d download the free program celestia and turn on the constellation lines, and play with it to see what i mean.

#6

My answer is that the star patterns given in the Map Room do actually match the constellations on Erf. We never saw them close enough to confirm that they were identical to the Earth constellations we know. They pointed the way to Erf.

Once the Colonials settled on the real Earth their only really form of after dinner entertainment left to them was to tell stories around the campfire. So they looked up into the night sky and formed the constellations around their old colonial symbols. As Earth was in the same galactic vicinity as Erf, some of the stars fit in the same positions, but given the nature of constellations, there was certainly some wiggle room to make them fit the unique Earth star pattern…

#7

What I came to say. Also, it would explain why many of our constellations don’t really look like what they are supposed to represent. Also, the constellations in the Southern Hemisphere are totally different. Maybe some of those were the ones from Erf.

#8

Good point about the different hemispheres. However, the Zodiac constellations all lie on the ecliptic (the path of the sun across the sky) so they are visible from both hemispheres. They’re just upside down to those from the South… :wink:

#9

This is how I see it too. The map room was only there to guide humanity to the planet that the 13th tribe had settled on. And it apparently did its job. It wasn’t there to guide the way to our Earth.

The force of fate that took them further to our Earth seems to be something very different than the prophecies in Colonial religion. It seems to be something beyond that.

#10

that will hold water until we revisit the episode and look at the constellations the map room shows. i’m assuming they will be our earth constellations.

#11

I think I confused myself in my earlier post. I realize now that this thread is about why known constellations for our Earth showed up in the map room on Kobol to lead them to Erf. And how could the constellations be the same for both planets?

Ok I get it now. I am not blond, nor do I drink, so I don’t know why I didn’t understand before :rolleyes: Sorry.

I’m going to say its due to changes in writers over several years.

#12

agreed. but i’m a nerd so i have to rationalize it because its the biggest logical error of the series. so i’m going to tell myself that urf was around one of the centauris or bernards star. close enough that gaeta could have recognized some of the constellations. but not far enough so that they’d be skewed beyond recognition.

#13

Alpha Centauri thing makes sense.

If you look closely, there was the Orion in the back ground somewhere in the finale when they jumped to our Earth. So the constellation matches as well.

#14

I think that’s as good an explanation as any. Stars would shift A LOT in 150,000 years–even a few thousand years makes an appreciable difference–so it’s kind of difficult to process that any place would have constellations that match basically what our zodiac looks like, since they wouldn’t have looked like that even on our Earth 150,000 years ago.

#15

actually some constellations like Orion, formed by stars far away from Earth will have changed little. So it still could be recognizable. However, it’s not as if the CGI department got the constellation thing consistent through out the series anyway.

http://www.galactica-science.com/battlestar/blog/episodes/daybreak-part-2/

Awesome site with a lot of constellation in show comparison.

#16

you don’t even have to look closesly. orion’s sword just about smacks you in the face. IYKWIM

#17

Yeah, Orion is one of the few major constellations whose most recognizable stars would look essentially the same–the few close stars in Orion’s “elbow” would go wonky pretty fast, but the belt and the stars that denote Orion’s “torso” would stay relatively in place. However, at least some of the zodiac constellations shift really dramatically; I tracked Virgo and Cancer’s shifts over about 100,000 years (as far back as my software goes), and they’re close to unrecognizable. But, like you said, accuracy of the stars was never something the production was going for–we saw Orion looking like Orion, even with the “elbow” stars in the right place, on and off for over a half-season, even though the Fleet was jumping around.