In 2015, Elite: Dangerous used a tester video on their launcher menu screen that appeared to show a "dark wheel" space station in an unknown star system. The Dark Wheel is one of two Shangri-La places in the game lore. Known to exist, but never discovered, and it is claimed it is the gateway to the second secret location, Raxxla. The video shows a starfield AND a slice of the game's Milky Way galaxy disk, which is actually rendered by the game engine to reflect real stars and galactic material.

In 2019, I speculated on using Machine Learning to capture images from around the game galaxy and train a Deep Learning image model to predict galactic location, but I didn't pursue the endeavor because of other distractions that hit my life and the world around me not long after.

I revisited this in 2026 and figured out I didn't need machine learning to draw some conclusions and then hit on a realization that led to a breakthrough. I successfully localized the position AND pose of the in-game screenshot video to a specific star system, 11 years later, using conventional computer vision and celestial vision navigation methodologies.

This is a long post. Get your caffeine or Leestian Evil Juice ready.