Almost There
23 Jun 2020Dante Cortez
I'm about 70 jumps - between 2300-2500 ly - out from Eta Carinae and the Guardian ruins. It's been a long, strange journey, but on this leg, I came across what may be the strangest thing I've ever seen. Looking for a place to land for the night, I spotted a moon with some geological signals orbiting a ringed gas giant. Turned out it was a small brown dwarf, but you know, toMAYto, toMAHto...Anyway, the system was Swoidai ZU-V d3-22 (x:6150.53 y:-93.50 z:569.47), and I headed for the first moon of the second planet (or dwarf star, whatever). But as I'm swooping in, suddenly I'm skimming along over an incredibly vast ring system. Here:
The tiny dot in the middle you can barely see? That's good old Planet Two, surrounded by that inner ring, which is pretty wide itself, more than 10 times the planet's radius. Then there's that gap, and there are two shepherd moons in there - I landed on the inner one - and then there's that ring, which according to my logs is almost 4.7 million km wide - 15.6 light-seconds - with a total radius of 7.75 million km. (There's also a third moon outside the giant ring, about 30-40 ls out, which is itself a ringed planetoid.) Holy smoke!