Beginning rework of Irimagik Campaign Setting, Galaxy Mapping

[moriturimax]

So, thanks to bartmoss and my finding this site while researching techniques for doing galaxy maps, I am posting my 1st attempt to breathe new life into my Campaign setting.

I particularly want to create an in-depth settings book for it for the iBooks apple store using Author. I really, really like the potential of that program. I want to make a whole series of "Alternitechnity Galactica" guidebooks sort of like Mechanismo and the old Terran Trade Authority superbooks that came out a while back. The feeling and atmosphere was super-positive and they always cheered me up reading them. It really helped get me into Science Fiction and I've never looked back at my choice of reading genre.

While I don't have nearly the skill of those guys, I do want to create the maps and descriptive dialog to go along with them, along with stats for the Alternity RPG in the back part of the book. Each book will cover a specific time period and I do want to have interactive maps that show the progress of conflicts, where as you drag the timeline under the map it shows the movements of explorers or fleets. Again, I am really super-psyched and to make sure my work doesn't bog me down, I just ordered my first liquid cooled i7-3930 PC to keep photoshop and illustrator from crying when I open graphics... heh.

But to start things off, here is my selected background map that everything else will branch off of. It's about 19MB, and I hope my link works. Let me know what you think, it's based off of the Pinwheel Galaxy, and this is the raw image that I am working on which will be getting extra details such as UI overlay. It's roughly 340,000LY across with a more turbulent structure than our milky way.

Dropbox link to (Irimagik Galaxy)

I have 3 distinct star densities in this map, each has it's own color.