Mapping the Galaxy

The galaxy is a big place. Not that you'd know it from Star Wars, where they zip from one end to the other in a matter of hours. Trek is better about it; the USS Voyager would've taken 75 years to get home from the Delta Quadrant without the aid of some convenient wormholes. But even in Trek, regions of space usually don't get identified with many terms beyond "system," "sector," and occasionally "cluster," though there are exceptions, such as the "Badlands," the "Briar Patch," and the "Delphic Expanse."

Contrast this with games like Homeworld and Mass Effect, which feature much more fanciful and entertaining names like "Gardens of Kadesh," "Diamond Shoals," "Shrike Abyssal," "Maroon Sea," or "Minos Wasteland." And all of these are backdropped by beautiful nebulae instead of the black night of space with the tiny points of the stars. I like this idea because it characterizes space as more than the void between planets.

It's full of stars! (Source: Steam)

With that in mind, here's my idea of a sci-fi version of the Milky way I threw together one evening.

All I really did was MS-Paint some map markings over a public domain NASA image. Enjoy!