Even at WF7 using the WF^5 system, this distance would take 35 days to cover. Even if Cestus III was right on the edge of their charts and they were travelling Warp 6 most of the way, this would place Warp 6 at 44,276(c) - this meshes well with the WF^5 system but very badly with everything else!Īt the end of the episode the Enterprise is flung 500 parsecs (1,631 LYs) away from the Metron system.

Mr DePaul then reports that they have travelled '22.3 parsecs beyond the latest chart limit'.Ģ2.3 Parsecs is 72.732 LYs.

This means that 0.6 SD units (maybe half a day) has passed since the first log entry.

Increase speed to Warp 6 some time before SD-3046.2.

The Enterprise then pursues the Gorn ship for a while at Warp 5.First captain's log is SD-3045.6, on the planet.I'll deal with those another time, so here are the significant uses and their problems: NOTE: I mentioned the 'significant' uses of parsec above as there many more uses where the term is just mentioned in passing, or in ways where specific times or distances were not a major problem. Speaking of speed and distance, here are the two Warp speed charts I will be consulting during this exercise, the standard TNG chart and the TOS Warp-Factor-to-the-power-of-five chart (it goes without saying that the TOS WF-cubed system is too slow for anyone's purposes and bears no resemblence to Warp speeds on any of the series): In Star Trek 'light year' (LY) was by far the more common term but it is interesting to see that in virtually all of Parsec's significant appearances it was used to express unusually massive units of distance enough to skew the Warp Speed charts and make TOS (as it occurred there most often) appear as a continuity orphan in terms of speed and distance that its ships travelled. The term often got bandied around in science fiction, probably to avoid the characters saying 'light years' all the time (and the associated misinterpretation that the latter were a measurement of time, not distance). Though unimaginable, it gives us the idea that the earth may be big, but the distance in space is definitely immense.The practical upshot of this is that 1 Parsec = 3.2615638 light years. Roughly converted to miles would give us an approximate value of 19 million trillion (is there such a thing?) miles.

Let’s say that a parsec is about 30 trillion kilometers. Using earth-land measurements for distances in space is simply mind-boggling, to say the least. For convenience, astrologists looked for a way to emphasize a great distinction in measurements, especially if you’re talking about measuring galaxies or clusters in space. In reality, astronomers cannot use the normal units of measurements such as meters and square meters as the measurements would be too big a number. The mega parsec was said to have been first used by the international scientific and astronomical community in the year 1920. So if one megaparsec is equal to one million parsecs, then that’s about 3.3 million light years away. It is said that one parsec is equal to about 3.3 light years. Just like the parsec (an abbreviation for Parallax of one arcsecond) and kiloparsec (equivalent to 1,000 parsecs, or KPC for short), the megaparsec (or MPC) is a measurement unit that is used in astronomy to measure the great, vast distance between galaxies in intergalactic space.

Parsec abbreviation