Messier 78
05 Mar 2016Thelan
Messier 78 Nebula lies right in front and slightly "above" the Barnard's Loop, if one approaches from Sol. The Orion and Running Man nebulae are right "below" it and the Loop covers the entire far half of the sky sphere.
Messier 78 generally follows the same layout as Witch's Head and Running Man, with two areas of luminous hot gas separated by a central dark bar, but is smaller and has a distinct sapphire blue color. There are no accessible stars in the nebula itself, but you can get some good views of it from the few closest surrounding systems.
Red and blue clash in the sky over this moon, like colors of some angelic football teams.
For some reason, as I found out, the central bar in all those three nebulae is always more or less aligned with the galaxy plane and, fully or partially, obscurs the disk of the Milky Way. Seeing that battle of light and darkness never gets old. (At least, for the first few minutes!)
Suddenly, the scanner picks something. It's a wrecked Scarab - a testament of someone's failed explorer ambitions. I salvaged some Gold from it. This fellow certainly had better luck than me (before he crashed, of course) - I have found nothing but Iron and Carbon on this blasted snowball.
But, after some consideration, I... dumped the container back onto the ice. This cargo will inevitably attract pirates in the bubble, and my exploration data are worth much more than a tonne of Gold.
On the way "down" from Messier 78 and towards the Flame Nebula, I found an interesting metal-rich world that is well on its way of becoming an Earthlike - in a billion years or so, of course.
Looks almost like an Earthlike, but it isn't. The thick atmosphere is methane and nitrogen. I wonder if there's already some primitive anaerobic microbial life down there in that overheated mineral soup of an ocean.
It's terraformable, though, so the ever-expanding humanity will probably destroy it sooner or later.