Apr 07 2009
Delta Pavonis
Several of the opening chapters of The Chara Talisman take place in a jungle on the third planet of Delta Pavonis. The planet and the main city (well, town) are named Verdigris, whoever named the place was struck by how green much of it was.
Of course, there may not be such a planet in reality, but the star Delta Pavonis is real enough. It’s about 19.9 light years away from Earth (about two weeks travel time given the warp drives of the T-Space universe), in the southern constellation Pavo. About the same mass as our sun (Sol) but anywhere from 0.5 to 2.5 billion years older, it is on the verge of going red giant. In real life, nobody has yet detected planets around Delta Pavonis, but it has a high metal content (higher than Sol) which is considered a good indicator for planets. Because of this, it’s general similarity to Sol, and its greater age, it’s considered one of the better SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) out there. It is also one of the top 100 target stars for NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder project. Delta Pavonis’s orbit around the galaxy is very similar to our sun’s, and so has been in our neighborhood for a long time (one galactic orbit takes about 240 million years.)
Delta Pavonis is about 9.2 light years from Epsilon Indi and 16.5 light years from Alpha Centauri. (That’s about 6.7 and 12 days travel, respectively, at 500c.)
The classic Rand study that led to Habitable Planets for Man by Isaac Asimov and Stephen Dole listed Delta Pavonis as a possible location for Earth-like planets. This led Tom Purdom to use it for the locale of his Tree Lord of Imeten (set on Delta Pavonis II), and may have been Frank Herbert’s influence in placing the planet Caladan, ancestral home of the house Atreides in Dune, around Delta Pavonis (its third planet). By coincidence, both Imeten and Caladan tend to dense forest, as does Verdigris (although perhaps my choice was a subconcious memory). Of course, many other writers, including Frederik Pohl and Alastair Reynolds, have set stories or events in the Delta Pavonis system too.
Updated 6/13/10 – The new working title for The Venaticorum Artifact is The Chara Talisman; other minor edits.
[...] added a page on the star system Delta Pavonis to the T-space pages. I plan to add pages there on a regular basis. They give the astronomical [...]