Since I was a little kid, astronomy and space fascinated me as much as, if not more than, science fiction and horror.  Seeing pictures in encyclopedias and magazines of planets made my imagination go wild.  This was back in the days of the Voyager space probes meandering through our solar system and taking unprecedented shots, so I was in steady supply of new and amazing pictures.

Flash forward to now.  The instruments taking the pictures are of a much higher resolution and are disseminated throughout the Internet a few hours after being received on Earth for all of us to share.  Millions of stargazers such as myself get a special treat, almost like a second childhood, to see further into the Universe.

Treats like the one today on Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD):

Tycho's Supernova (click to enlarge)

This kind of fascination with space might explain why I am so passionate about Star Merchant and wanted to make sure things were fairly accurate when it came to the space stuff.  If you’ve played SM, you might have noticed the distances between stars and their spectral classifications were pretty much straight out of the book.  I loved that it adhered to some semblance of realism as a basis, while also letting you fly between them with faster-than-light engines.