Oh look, shiny!
25 Oct 2019Dante Cortez
So there I was, sitting just off the Elephant's Trunk Nebula. The next system over had a surprise in it for me, so I popped over to take a look and... Well, there it was:
I had actually watched some video of how to supercharge my FSD in the jet cone, but I hadn't contemplated what it would be like in real life. I think if I had to summarize the experience in a word, that word would be TERRIFYING.
First, I had to travel half a million light-seconds to get to the thing - not so terrifying, but I decided it would be a good idea to be VERY careful about not flying into it. Then I sat and watched it for a while. Holy crap, those things are bizarre. (I am glad my ship is radiation-shielded, too.) The terrifying part was figuring out the angle and speed to fly into the jet and let it fling me around while my FSD soaked up the extra juice. It took me two tries - it's almost impossible to tell visually how close you really are to the jet - but I managed it.
I wound up not actually using the supercharge. I assume it has dissipated by now. But something else had grabbed my attention. What had been a tiny bright smear in the sky back in the Bubble had become a line of very bright stars somewhere *waves hands* over there. Something that had to be investigated, of course. They weren't readily identifiable on my map, so I had to do some trial-and-error plotting until I could figure out which direction I needed to jump to get closer. I finally found a path and figured out what they are.
It's another nebula. NGC 7822, to be exact. I can't tell for sure, but it looks like that bright line of stars is a bunch of very young stars. This could be a planetary nursery. (Which undoubtedly means others have been here before me, but I am still going to poke around.)
I managed to catch a good shot of the nebula as I was coming out of the shadow of a water world I was orbiting. I mean, you can see why I was drawn to it, right?
