"real worlds" space opera?

[traceur]

i was looking at Google-sky, and thinking of the emerging digital map of the universe and thought "wouldn't it be interesting to see this map in sci-fi shows instead of the artistic renders were used to see in space opera"..
but then add to that the planetary finder telescopes currently in production:
we're going to have planets with little spectrography analysis of of there mas and maybe with the next-gen telescopes also there atmospheres... and that's about it. it will be like the people first seen mars through a telescope and speculating what might be there... except with a lot more planets.

why not use this? what about a space opera in which every season visits the planetary systems discovered in RL in the year prior to that seasons production?

the series doesn't have to be completely hard-science in nature but but the places it will visit will be speculations about places which are real.

[eburacum45]

I have used a few recently discovered systems in OA; here is VB10
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b0ff6031a292

The trouble is, the extrasolar planets being found at the moment are not very hospitable to human beings in their current form. And when smaller worlds start being discovered, I think their physical characteristics will not be known very accurately, so that each planet will be a very hypothetical entity.

[KaiYeves]

The problem would be if the astronomers have an off year and don't find enough planets to support a full season.

[IsaacKuo]

Discovered, announced, or confirmed? There could be years between them.

So, I think it would be most practical to stick with just one star system, or a small number of star systems. A lot of star systems have a big variety of weird things to offer. For example, Xi Ursae Majoris has two stars with companions suitable for retrograde colony clusters. Castor is a sextuple star system of three binaries. Epsilon Eridani and Mu Arae and other systems have multiple detected planets.

There's a lot out there.