This map plots 466 star systems and follows Starfleet ships through 753 episodes and thirteen films. It can tell you who holds a world, which side of the Alpha/Beta line it sits on, and which episode took a ship there. What it mostly can't tell you is how far away anything is — because Star Trek almost never says. Here's how we handle that, and what we got wrong on the way.
A real sky, and a city that isn't there
Star Trek anchors itself to real stars. Wolf 359, Procyon, 40 Eridani — those are out there tonight. Then it ignores everything that implies. Ships reach Vulcan, Andoria and Qo'noS in comparable time, though the real stars behind them sit at wildly different distances. Deneb IV is a frontier world the Enterprise-D reaches in a couple of days; the real Deneb is about 2,600 light years away.
So the first decision, made before this was really a project: plot the fiction, not the sky. Positions here serve the story's geography — which empire borders which, which side of the meridian a world falls on, how the wormhole and Voyager's long walk home actually route. Not literal light years.
That choice is defensible. It also excuses almost any coordinate, which is why everything below exists.
What you can trust on this map
Click any system and you'll see a small badge. It isn't a rating of the planet — it's a rating of the dot: how much we actually know about where that world belongs.
INFERRED — canon gives a quadrant, a sector, or a named neighbour. The neighbourhood is real; the exact spot is ours.
PLACEHOLDER — nothing states where this is. We put it somewhere sensible and said so.
Most of the map is that third one, and the reason is not laziness. Canon states a distance for 44 of 466 worlds. For everything else, the encyclopedia will tell you the quadrant, the affiliation, the species and the episode — and not one word about how far.
A world can be the most famous planet in Trek and still be a placeholder. Memory Alpha saying "Alpha or Beta Quadrant" isn't a weak source; it's a good source telling you the position is unknowable. We'd rather show that than invent a number.
Relationships on this map are checked. Distances mostly aren't stated anywhere, and where we've had to choose, the badge says so.
Where the scale bar tells the truth, and where it doesn't
Near Sol, one grid unit is about one light year, and the bar in the corner means what it says. Further out it stops being true, and the map now admits it rather than letting you find out.
| Band | Worlds | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| drawn at roughly its real distance | 17 | Wolf 359 · Vulcan · Axanar · Acamar III |
| drawn closer than canon | 5 | Deneb IV · Mintaka III · Merak II |
| drawn further than canon | 1 | Andoria |
So it's close to one-to-one wherever it can be, with local drift in both directions, and heavy compression only where canon would run off the edge of the chart. Deneb IV is drawn at about a ninth of its stated distance because 2,600 light years doesn't fit. The Gamma and Delta clusters fold 70,000 light years into roughly a thousand units, which is the only way Voyager's journey can share a screen with Bajor.
Click a world with a known distance and the panel prints both figures side by side — "Deneb (Alpha Cygni) — ~2,615 ly, drawn at 284 u" — so the two can disagree in the open.
When we move a world, and when we leave it wrong
The tempting fix, whenever canon states a distance we don't match, is to drag the world until the numbers agree. We almost never do, because chasing one number breaks three relationships, and because canon regularly contradicts itself — Qo'noS is ninety light years away in dialogue and over a hundred in the licensed atlases.
A world moves only when two things are true at once: the error is enormous, and it puts the world somewhere it plainly cannot be.
Argelius II — not moved. Also wrong by a factor of two. But nothing contained it before or after, so correcting it would have been chasing a number for its own sake. The change was made and reverted the same day.
A distance hidden in an axis nobody draws
Every world here carries three coordinates. The map is flat: it draws two of them and ignores the third. An earlier pass, correcting worlds to their canon distances, quietly did the arithmetic in all three.
distance stored in the data: 19.0 — exactly right
distance the map actually drew: 5.0
our own accuracy table: listed it as heavily compressed
Both things were true at once. The coordinate was correct in a dimension no reader can see — and the system panel was telling visitors the world wasn't to scale while the data insisted it was.
So we settled it: distance means what the map draws. Two worlds were rotated onto the flat plane, keeping their direction, so the distance they already claimed became the one you see. Nothing was invented. The hundred-odd other worlds whose third coordinate disagrees stayed exactly where they are — nobody ever cited those numbers, and moving them would fling systems across the chart on no authority at all.
Voyager was getting further from home
The premise of the series is a ship crossing 70,000 light years toward Earth. Our map had it further from Earth in season seven than in season one, with no progression in between. Seven years of television, inverted.
The Delta Quadrant worlds are now placed by when Voyager reached them. Distance from Sol follows the ship's own stated countdown — the seventy-five years announced in "Caretaker", down through the four canon shortcuts, to the "approximately 32 years" checkpoint in season six.
That's only defensible because Memory Alpha states no coordinates for any Delta Quadrant world. There was no geography to overwrite. It buys nothing elsewhere: in the Alpha and Beta core, directions carry borders and neighbours, and they stay put.
Which is the lesson worth keeping: when a measurement says everything is fine, ask what its best possible score would look like on screen. If the ideal is something you'd reject, the measurement is scoring the wrong thing.
Deep Space 9 is a hub, not a journey
Every other series draws a travelled line through its route in order. Applied to DS9, that flew a space station to sixty-nine places it cannot go, and crossed its own path 484 times.
The station is now pinned. A single line runs to wherever the current episode is set, and everywhere else the series reached is marked but unconnected. Bajor sits a fraction of a unit away — which is correct, since the station orbits it, and the marker is drawn around the station glyph for exactly that reason.
A film is an itinerary, not a location
The films were once thirteen entries, one place each. The Wrath of Khan was Regula I — with neither Ceti Alpha V nor the Mutara Nebula. The timeline had one step per film and the line joining them traced nothing at all.
They now carry forty stops across thirteen films, in the order each film visits them. Television routes sort by stardate; a film carries one stardate for the whole picture, and five of the thirteen carry none. And some legs aren't journeys: the jump from Nemesis to the 2009 film runs from Romulus in 2379 to Vulcan in 2258, across eighty years and into another timeline. Those are drawn as separate paths rather than one impossible one.
Where the facts come from
Almost everything here traces to Memory Alpha, read for what it actually states rather than what it implies. Where it's silent, we say so instead of filling the gap.
That rule exists because we broke it. One of the original inputs was graded "high accuracy, cross-referenced with canon" in our own notes. It was a set of automatically generated captions from a fan video. Speech recognition had turned the Cardassian rebellion into "the Kardashian rebellion", Bringloid V into "bring lloid 5", Mintaka III into "mina 3". The narrator hedged his own guesses on camera — "it's uncertain where these systems are located". Those hedges didn't survive into the data.
worlds traceable to them: 68
whose names appear on no Star Trek wiki at all: 25
Eleven turned out to be mangled spellings of real places and were corrected. The rest are marked, not deleted — an unfamiliar name isn't proof of an invented one, and five worlds were one spelling variant away from being wrongly erased. Norcadia is "Norcadia Prime". The Borderland is "Borderland".
Other sources have been offered and measured. A fan atlas whose author states he made "more than 100 changes" to the licensed original without saying where. A mapping package whose cartographic data turned out to be eighteen rows of pixel positions on fan art. A site whose implied scale varies almost tenfold across one image. All declined, with the measurements written down so the same suggestion doesn't come back every few months.
And the one that would fix everything: Star Trek: Star Charts, the licensed atlas, the only source with real coordinates. We use it — through Memory Alpha, which quotes it page by page. We don't copy it. Restating a fact an encyclopedia reports is one thing; transcribing an atlas plate by plate into a public dataset is another, and it isn't ours to do.
What we deliberately don't draw
Several things are missing on purpose.
Borg territory. Not merely too big — backwards. Voyager reaches the heart of Borg space in the season three finale, yet our shape contained 71% of season one's worlds and none of season five's. Neelix's homeworld sat inside it. No shifting or resizing separated the early journey from the late one, because the underlying coordinates never encoded the journey at all. Shrinking it to a smaller guess would have swapped one unsupported claim for another.
Two series. Enterprise has no stated location for 71% of its episodes; the Animated Series has no faction territories at all and renders as a bare starfield. Both are hidden until the data can support them.
A DS9 episode that doesn't exist. Six route steps carried the title "The Final Arc", sharing a single pasted synopsis, with evenly spaced invented stardates, pointing at six worlds five of which appear on no wiki. It isn't an episode. It's now gone, and DS9 dropped from 170 entries to 164 — because it was never 170.
Every one of these is a display choice, not a deletion. The underlying rows stay. Hiding is reversible; inventing is not.
How we catch ourselves being wrong
The map has automated screenshot tests, and they cannot see the thing they look like they cover. One world plus its label is about 0.09% of the frame. Moving a world 300 units, relocating Talos IV, and deleting an entire faction territory each produced no test failure at all. Removing three sidebar buttons tripped them instantly.
So the working rule is that green tests are not evidence for a data change, and someone looks at the map — zoomed in far enough that individual worlds draw, because at a distance the map merges them into count bubbles and hides exactly the mistakes worth finding. Two Voyager layouts shipped looking wrong while every measurement was green. Both were caught by a human looking at the screen.
The same habit applies to our own records. A world was recently found marked "verified" on the strength of a note citing a fan-drawn plate this project had already measured and rejected. A claim backed by a rejected source is worse than one backed by nothing, because the note reads like evidence. Twenty-six such marks were withdrawn in one pass.
Free, ad-free, and staying that way
The dataset is derived from Memory Alpha and inherits its non-commercial licence, so attribution is an obligation here rather than a courtesy. TrekCharts is a free, web-only, unofficial fan project — no ads, no paywall, nothing for sale. The Ko-fi link in the footer takes one-off tips toward hosting; subscriptions are switched off.
There's no plan for a 3D map. Depth is a dimension the sources can't fill: canon states a distance now and then, a direction never, and an elevation never.
Why any of this is written down
TrekCharts is built largely with AI coding agents, which is why every decision above also exists in the repository as a short rule with the mistake that produced it attached. An assistant with no memory of last month will happily re-chase a canon distance, re-flip the vertical axis, or re-trust a source that reads as authoritative — unless the reasoning is sitting in the file it opens.
It has also turned out to be the honest way to run a fan map. Most of these positions are somebody's best guess. Saying which ones, and why, is the only version of this project worth publishing.