Going Walkabout: To the Top of the Galaxy
11 Aug 2020Seth Bradwell
On reaching Sagittarius A*, I felt a sense of relief that I was now about one third of the way to my destination. However I had started to relax as I left the Bubble behind me, and decided on a detour, and aimed to see how far "upwards" (a subjective definition applied by Universal Cartographics since in reality there is no up or down in space but either way, one of the two furthest points you can travel going perpendicular to the galactic plane) I could go. That place turned out to be a T Tauri star located 2,870 Ly from Sagittarius A* called Quemeou YE-A e0, although the exploration community have bestowed upon it a rather more fetching name of Altum Sagittarii Prime. This was a region where scoopable stars were of relative low abundance, so I had to plan my journey relatively carefully, and filling my tank up to the max whenever I did encounter a scoopable star. On the way up I encountered this binary system where the two stars were orbiting very closely to each other, something I would encounter more of during my voyage:
After about two hours, I reach Altum Sagittarii Prime, and set some distance from the star, moving several tens of thousands of light years further into the Void before looking back on the galaxy below me:
The bright spot in the centre is due to distortions from Sagittarius A* I reckon.
This is the view of the rest of the galactic disc:
Finally, a view of the Leif Erikson with the galactic disk as a backdrop:
Next time I will be exploring further into the uppermost reaches of the galaxy, before making my way down to the galactic plane again so I can continue my journey to Beagle point and beyond...