Local Nebulae
07 Mar 2017Robert Phillips
The populated bubble of the core systems is not far away from some really nice stellar tourist spots.I was carrying passengers for The Millennium Dustbin's shakedown cruise, and couldn't help but get distracted by some eye candy on the way to their destination. They had weeks before they needed to return to port, so they were in no hurry.
The Fine Ring Sector is the home of Shapley 1, otherwise known as the Fine Ring Nebula. It is one of the more unusual nebulae visible in the galaxy due to it's shape and striking blue/purple colours:
It has but a single star inside it, and no stellar bodies, which makes it difficult to get any striking pictures from inside the nebula itself.
My next destination was Antares, the 15th brightest star in the sky when viewed from Sol. It is a red supergiant star - over 800 times the diameter of Sol - making it enormous by any measure.
The Antares system is a binary star system, and is unusual in that Antares A is *not* the most massive star in that system (although it is by far the biggest). A smaller, but more dense, Class B star is it's binary partner, and it is *this* star that a ship's FSD drive arrives at. Antares A is over 170,000 LS away. For that reason, I decided to tour the stellar bodies orbiting Antares B.
Antares B 4 has an enormous ring system around it:
And Antares B 7 looks quite striking when seen from within it's ring system:
I moved on to another bright star - V970 Scorpii, which is a multi-star system. V970 Scorpii A is 5 times the size of the Sun, and is orbited by a pair of neutron stars:
Then, I went to see a small nebula called Mammon (originally called the IC 1287 Nebula):
And, while still on a buzz for nebulae, I headed toward the Dumbbell Nebula:
The nebula contains a terraformable water world which will provide spectacular night time views to anyone on the surface:
I decide to rest here and enjoy the view for a while...