Massive Nebulae Excursion, Day 3
31 Dec 2016Tervaskanto
DAY 3Started off by exploring the Cave Nebula. While there wasn't much, I did find one potential candidate planet for a barnacle hunt. While the surface temperature of the planet was lower than any known barnacle site, all the other criteria matched up, so I gave it a go. Sadly, despite an hour of searching, I had no luck on that particular planet. That said, there's still a ton of systems in the Cave Nebula that I didn't visit, so who knows, something could be there. But since the search for alien life is not the primary goal of this jaunt, I decided to move on to see more of what lay out in the wild black yonder.
My next destination wasn't terribly far from the Cave Nebula, and it had caught my eye all the way from the Iris Nebula, where I first noticed the large bright glow on the horizon. Turns out that it wasn't as close to the Iris as I had envisioned...what I had seen was the NGC 7288 Nebula. The actual nebula wasn't visible from such a distance, but the giant cluster of O-Class stars inside it were bright enough to draw one's eye toward it. Upon my arrival, I was met with a ton of O-Class stars, black holes, and interesting systems. While there weren't any potential barnacle sites in the systems I scanned, there were a TON of interesting systems that were worth scanning. One system had a gas giant orbiting a pair of black holes in a binary orbit, there was another system containing a whopping nine scoopable stars orbiting an O-type star, with another four non-scoopables orbiting a black hole...basically, nothing worth looking around for barnacles, but a great place to go for scan data. In fact, I'll likely make another jaunt out there to scan the systems I skipped, just because it's some valuable space that's reasonably close to the bubble.
As for my next destination, I had considered the Bubble Nebula, as well as the Heart and Soul Nebulae, but given that there is little between them and my current location that piques my interest, and the fact that they are in the opposite direction of where I want to go, I've decided to instead check out a Wolf-Rayet star I found in a nebula about 900LY from NGC 7288. That said, it would appear that my navigational array cannot find a suitable course to get me there. It seems I've already gotten to a point that, despite a 31.1LY jump range, I just can't get where I want to go. But it's no big deal, I'll get there...if bad comes to worse, I have enough ingredients to get a few FSD injections if needed. I'd just rather save those for an emergency if at all possible. I've still got a LONG way to go after all.