Expedition Log, Orion Molecular Cloud Complex
29 Oct 2017User78245
Date of Commencement: 14 October 3303Date of Completion: 20 November 3303
Starting Point: Lave Station, Lave
Ending Point: Lave Station, Lave
Distance Traveled: 7960.98 light years
Equipment Used: VFS-04 Tanis Richards
Mission Statement: To explore and survey the California Nebula, the Witch Head Nebula, the Spirograph Nebula, and the various components of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.
Remarks: What began as a simple shakedown cruise of my new exploration vessel has become my first full-blown expedition with it. It began about 14 days ago with a short jaunt to the Hermitage system to follow a rumor of a derelict INRA installation. Then it became a perilous crossing of Thargoid-patrolled space near the Pleiades to the California Nebula. After getting some medical issues cleared up, I began my exploration.
Mic Turner Base, once I sat back and really took a look at it, is quite the spot. An Alliance surface port that sits in the dark side of a tidally locked planet, it affords some great views of the California Nebula.
A short SRV trip outside the base gave me a close up view of the Mic Turner Bark Mounds, a large colony of alien fungal mounds.
The California Nebula is quite possibly one of the more visually impressive nebulae I've yet encountered.
As I've come to find out in this nebula, and later in the Witch Head Nebula, barnacles are behaving differently than the ones I found in the Pleiades. They appear to be sick, or maybe on the verge of changing (hatching?) somehow. I've noticed in multiple instances a pool of green liquid at their bases.
The trip to the Witch Head Nebula required some careful plotting, as Universal Cartographics forbids witch space jumps into the adjacent Col 70 Sector for unknown reasons. Some pilots say it's a haunted place, but spacers are a superstition lot sometimes. I don't believe it myself. I skirted the edges as close as the navigation computer would permit me, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Just normal black space. The Witch Head Nebula looks to me as a cross between the Pleiades and the Coalsack Nebula: a bluish cloud with bands of dark light-absorbing material.
And it's kept lit by Rigel A, a star 55 times the diameter of Sol.
My next move is to rendezvous with The Gnosis in the Spirograph Nebula, then onwards into the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. Except for the trip in, everything has been running relatively smoothly. I'm quite impressed with the capabilities of this ship.