Locating Jouret IV

While writing the last post, I found reference to Jouret IV showing up on a star chart in "Child's Play"[VOY].

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Jouret_IV

I pulled up the episode on StarTrek.com and checked for the context. Turns out there really wasn't any context except for Icheb just going nuts multitasking with all kinds of screens going in Astrometrics. So, the fact that Jouret IV was shown in an image near Rigel and Vega means nothing.

But out of curiosity (since the real Rigel is like 3000 LY away as I recall whereas Vega is nextdoor), I went ahead and looked around further.

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/50lys.html

Vega is "west-northwest" of us and about ten light-years "higher", at a distance of about 25 light-years. Rigel is listed at that site as 770 LY distant (Wikipedia, more recently, gives it 860). But so near as I can tell from http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/5000lys.html Rigel ought to be basically in the complete opposite direction from Vega.

That suggests that Icheb's star chart was not a "top down" map, but a projection from some location that is not Earth.

However, ignoring the multitude of Rigels some suggest as a way of dealing with Star Trek, this could imply that, projected two-dimensionally, Jourey IV (which I'm going to spell that way because I keep typing a Y there so dammit) lies along a line that includes Rigel and Vega.

Of course, then there's Pollux IV on that map, too, at which point the whole plan goes to poo. Pollux is almost due "south" of us and rather higher, which just kills the angles. It's 34 light-years away per the Atlas site.

This is actually interesting, though, because if we ditch the Rigel and keep a line from Pollux to Vega, we still sort of basically end up pointing roughly 45 degrees west, or toward the northwest. (We could also go southeast, in principle, but I like that less.)

That would put Joureydammit IV off to the northwest, instead of the north-northeast (i.e. toward Borg space) as commonly assumed. (Well, I say "commonly" . . . this guy puts it in weirdville in the F/K/R triangle region, about 75 LY from Sol to the ESE: http://www.sttff.net/AST_MAP.html )

The westerly positioning could actually dovetail pretty nicely with my recent ruminations on the Borg which featured the "Borg in the Northwest" hypothesis.

http://dsg2k.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-borg-have-been-busy-ii-assimilation.html

JouretokayfineIbackspacedthistime IV being toward the northwest, in other words, actually fits that, and we could even go further and suggest the presence of a transwarp doomaflotchy there. (The one a light-year from Earth in the Voyager finale would just be a new thing or fluke).