On Earth, the cardinal directions are straightforward. The arrow on a compass points to the nearest magnetic pole. You can then use it to travel anywhere on Earth.
In space, the idea of anything being “central” enough to be used as a “North” (since the universe has no center) or being fixated enough to not somehow pose issues is more convoluted.
If you were a pioneer of space exploration, what would your “North” be?
The “prime meridian” is the line through the black holes at the centers of the Milky Way and Andromeda, and the “equator” is the galactic plane.
If they’re intergalactic explorers, why would they care about the plane of our ordinary galaxy?
Why would they choose those 2 galaxies for a meridian?
Galactic coordinates are easy. OP asked about inter galactic.
Larry Niven kind of works out this naming in several of his novels. I don’t remember all the specifics, and he also used a similar scheme to describe travel in ring world, but it’s close enough. First, don’t bother with calling it north, that is just confusing. In the reference frame of yourself or the map you’re drawing in a spinning galaxy, you’ve got spinward (in relation to the galactic spin) and anti-spinward, in (toward galactic center) and out, and then normal (orthogonal) to those dimensions, which you could call up and down depending on your preference. I’d probably call spinward, inward, and up positive.
If you need a reference (north) for a galactic map, it’s really unlikely you’ll want to use anything like grid coordinates. You can use the same ideas from the local map. You’d probably want an origin at the gravity center of the galaxy and pick another object as a reference point from which to zero angular measurements around the disc. That other object could be another galaxy (if you want to measure galactic spin itself) or something distinct and obvious in our own galaxy (if you want to navigate within the galaxy). Most civilizations would probably just use a line between their home system and galactic center as their prime meridian. Up and down should be orthogonal to spin again. If you’re home planet had a magnetic pole roughly pointing out of the galactic disc (like ours), you’d probably choose your “north” pole’s side up.
Pointing at the north pole of Earth. You didn’t stipulate any other spacefaring species, so it’s not like there’d be competing standards.
I would just spin a quantum gyro, and let it decide…
It would point toward the galactic plane/center of the system.
Tons of space video games do this and it actually helps orient yourself really well.
Easy, the sun is the bright spot and anything else is too far away to even begin to think about exploring, so the Sun is a good point of reference for early explorers. Once you journey further than our solar system, you’d need another point of reference and it would most likely be the solar system as a whole.
The Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall.
Removed by mod
Well, let’s just try where a compass points to in space?
North is the right hand rule to galactic spin.
I’d use Earth.
We could keep using Polaris or find some really far galaxy or star as the north.
North, duh
