A Visit to the Nursery
11 May 2021Spark Chaser
Personal Log - 11 May 3307From a stellar graveyard, I visited a stellar nursery. Specifically the California Nebula, and not just one system in it. I jumped around to 4 different systems, all just to get a look at this massive emission nebula from different perspectives. Even making this logbook entry, with the journey fresh in my mind, I still find it difficult to put my swirling thoughts into form.
They journey was long, but not as long as many. About 1,000 Ly give or take. When I was a little girl, that would have been quite the journey for any ship. Now it is mundane. Boring. Jump into system, turn away from the bright glowing ball of plasma in my face and align to the next system. Rinse and repeat. Even as pleased as I am to be sitting nearly 1,000 Ly from where I started this journey, when I check my star charts I'm immediately flooded with a feeling of humility. I feel small even. On the galactic scale, I barely left my own garden. Despite everyone's best efforts to communicate the scale of the galaxy, using every conceivable metaphor, I failed to fully grasp the sheer inhuman size. I still fail, and trips like this remind me of that failure.
Once in the nebula, the galaxy looks very different. Through dark red clouds of gas and dust, illuminated by all the stars within it, you can just squint and make out what looks like the edge of the Orion Arm. It's easier to see once you get toward the outer systems in the nebula, sitting on the edge of it. When you're in the thick of it, all you see is red. It looks almost like at atmosphere. You can make out plenty of main sequence stars and what appears to be a few proto-stars. I was also struck by the amount of planets orbiting these young stars. I set down on a few of them, just to say I did. Just for the satisfaction of leaving footprints and tire marks in some distant planet. Perhaps one previously untrodden by man, or woman. It matters little to me if I was the actual first. What matters to me is that I've never been out this way before, and I'm collecting an enormous amount of scanning and charting data along the way. Given a few million or billion more years, perhaps these systems will leave the nursery and head out into the great wide open. If they're anything like me, they're a bit nervous to travel very far and overwhelmed at the size of the galaxy. Yep, I need to get back to the bubble soon. I'm anthropomorphizing balls of plasma, that can't be a good sign. Also wouldn't hurt for me to have some actual human interaction again. A proper bath would do wonders for my psyche as well. Think I'll start with the bath and go from there.
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” --- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy