Betelgeuse Sector

I was recently reading Leroy W. L. Guatney’s archived Traveller site, IISS Stellar Cartography. In the 90s and early 2000s, Leroy did a lot of development work on the trailing and rimward regions of Charted Space, particularly the Hive Federation. Many of his names for sectors appear to have been incorporated into Traveller canon.

I noticed something I hadn’t before: Leroy had named a “Betelgeuse sector” four sectors rimward of Magyar. This sector, which lies roughly 135 to 180 parsecs from Terra, is currently unnamed on Traveller Map.

The star Betelgeuse is a M1 Ia red supergiant, the tenth brightest star in the Terran sky. It is located in the constellation of Orion, which lies roughly rimward/spinward-rimward from Terra—so Leroy’s Betelgeuse sector is in the right direction relative to Terra.

Betelgeuse is normally listed as 642.5 light years (197 parsecs from Terra), which would unfortunately put the star outside the boundaries of Leroy’s Betelgeuse sector.

However, the star’s distance has been notoriously hard to pin down. A recent study found Betelgeuse to be about 25% closer than currently understood: an estimated 548 light years (168 parsecs) from Terra. And happily, this finding would put Betelgeuse squarely within Leroy’s sector, in either subsectors I/M, N, O, or P, somewhere on an arc from hex 0130 to hex 3234, plus or minus a lot, due to the vagaries of projecting 3-D stellar data unto a 2-D jump map.

Given this serendipity, I propose naming the sector located at (-1, -7) Betelgeuse. And while we’re at it, let’s place the following system in hex 1632 of that sector:

Betelgeuse Sector (-1, -7)

Hex	Name	UWP	Remarks	{Ix}	(Ex)	[Cx]	N	B	Z	PBG	W	A	Stellar
1632	Ardra	X000000-0	As Ba Va	{-3}	(500-5)	[0000]	-	-	-	000	4	NaXX	M1 Ib

Betelgeuse sector lies directly rimward of Holowon sector, and is a wilderness area only eighty parsecs removed from the edge of Charted Space. Betelgeuse would be a bright star from almost any world in Magyar sector, as well as any of the rimward sectors of the Solomani Confederation.

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