Re: starship-design: Massively Distributed Computing for SETI

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

Ben Franchuk writes:
 > But alas the program has the limit of about 5,000 BP ( or what ever
 > year 1 is for astronomers). Part of the time range I am looking
 > for is to 35,000 BP. No real reason other than I wonder what things
 > looked like during the last ice age.

There's a fairly high uncertainty in proper motion measurements for most
stars.  Even if you got a program to show you the sky adjusted for
stellar proper motion in 35,000 BP, it might not be that accurate.
Apparently the program you tried limits the time range it will display
to avoid going outside the range where the uncertainty would accumulate
to undesirable levels.