Approaching the BLEAE AEWSY nebula.
Another week of slow cruising has gone by, with a lot of random system scanning. I lucked out on a second undiscovered Earth-like world, a few ammonia worlds, and lots of water worlds and life-bearing gas giants. I’m now about half-way between Lave and the Great Annihilator, a black hole inside the core not too far from Sagittarius A* that i will be aiming for on the way.
Very noticeable since i left NGC6357, the BLEAE AEWSY nebula felt like a convenient general direction for my next stint, and so i’ve been watching it grow ever larger day after day, jump after jump. Yesterday, i finally reached it and crossed it slowly through ‘economical route’ navigation mode. That’s a neat tip i found on the Frontier forums: rather than manually pick close systems every time when you are in an area you would like to explore a bit more, simply switch the navigation computer to economical routing and simply plot a route across the area. The amount of small low-fuel jumps will ensure that you get to visit a good few systems as you travel.
The first striking impression of this nebula is its ominous dark colours. Very little light makes it through the gas clouds, making the inside sky an intimidating black and red landscape with little visible stars.
Inside the ominous red clouds.
To ease the mind, i found myself drifting into illuminated ice rings, the blue haze soothingly contrasting the red skies.
Blue rings, red sky.
A nice surprise in my traversal was an Earth-like world, already discovered of course as close nebulas have already been scanned by explorers for months. The night sky must be rather impressive from the ground.
Alien sun in a red sky above an Earth-like world.
Finally, on my way out of the nebula, i watched a sun rise over a planet, between the galactic plane and the red clouds.
Red sky sunrise.
Time to leave the beaten track again, and head through the undiscovered systems that populate the dark between the clouds. As dark and ominous as some of these landscapes were, i have to say all those “First discovered by” tags on the system map screen made the place feel positively crowded…
