The First Spirograph Nebula Planetary Landing

I originally visited the Spirograph Nebula on my trip to visit Orion during Easter earlier this year.  It has been a place I have wanted to return to ever since then and the opportunity to actually land there with Horizons was such an excuse.  The system is quite large with 50 celestial bodies, many of which are suitable for landing, as can be ascertained from the blue ring around the planets and moons on the system map.

The unique feature of the Spirograph Nebula is that it is a planetary nebula which has been formed from matter released from the large central B-Type star at the centre (in star catalogues BD-12 1172), the nebula is nearly a third of a light year across.

In the game the Spirograph Nebula translates to a vast region of "Green Space" which is quite unique.  I have watched so many Sci-Fi shows and movies over the years, but I have never seen anything like it. So for our first alien planetary landings CMDR Dingo77 and myself thought it was number one on the bucket list!

Planet 5 - complete with a ring had a moon with a 0.35 surface gravity, almost the same as that of Mars so we decided that would be a good place to start landing our large and heavy Imperial Clippers.

And we made it down without even a scrape!

The really cool thing about the Spirograph Nebula's green space is that it actually looks as if we have landed on a planet with a green atmosphere (maybe composed of Chlorine gas?) lol

What a view! 

To me in my Buggeh, it looked as if Dingo scratched his paintwork in the dust rings of the 69 Lambada Epsilon's 4th T Tauri star! lol

My lonely Buggeh!

Sag A* Screenies

Eighteen Hours into Our Sagittarius *A Pilgrimage

CMDR Dingo77 and I have undertaken the Sagittarius *A flight together as a wing.

Currently we are just over 18 hours into the trip and are 17,840 light years from Sol with just over 8,100 light years to go until we reach the Core.  We've made over 500 jumps so far, and the starfield ahead has now just "Popped" into light.


 
We are not stopping to scan anything; this is purely a speed run averaging just under 1,000 light years an hour.  We should reach the Core this coming weekend :-)

My Parking Spot for the Night: HIP 49392

High above Known Space, I stop for the night at my waypoint HIP 49392.  Its larger than Spica with a retinue of T-types and gas giants.  Some of them appear to be in orbit of each other, I'll look in more detail tomorrow.

Second planet out is a helium rich gas giant with rings, strange to find a gas giant so close to the primary star.

Explorer's Log: 6-APR-3301

After leaving the Spirograph Nebula behind I travel the final 650 light years towards the Horsehead Nebula.

When I first set out on this journey I didn't know if I could even reach Orion Nebula, let alone all the way through it and beyond to the Horsehead Nebula, but by some spark of luck the 19.75 light years that my (unstripped) Clipper can currently jump was just about enough to cover the largest hyperspace jumps, but only just, there has been a few occasions where the only route involved a 19.5 ly jump or even slightly more.  I may have made a few detours here and there on the trip out here, the route plotter sending me at right angles occasionally especially past the Witch Head Nebula where the stars started getting very diffuse.

First object of note was the 1999 Nebula, which is quite tiny, but inside you couldn't see Orion at all, there must have been a lot of dust in there blocking the view.

Next oddity, a T-Tauri that looked like an F-Class star - not orange or white, but yellow. That's the first one I've seen, maybe it's a bug?

The Running Man nebula is getting larger now, Barnard's loop is practically filling the module area of the screen.

MX Orionis 1 was a pretty "ice cream" gas giant.  All these systems were discovered of course, I think they must have been tagged by the first players to reach the region back in Gamma.

There's quite a lot of M-Class stars in Orion's Stellar Nursey as well as a couple of giant stars.  I even spotted a Neutron Star on the map in there, but didn't approach as I did not want to risk taking any damage on this first long trip.

Although I really had to laugh at this guy's name!

The Flame Nebula was pretty from a distance, looks a bit like the Eye of Sauron from this picture taken from The Running Man Sector.

Up close though the Flame Nebula loses much of its definition, you need to be farther away from it to appreciate it.

Once past the uterine wall of Orion's womb - well that's how I thought of it - the Stellar carpet gets very thin, and you can't see the Orion Nebula you just passed through hardly at all - you can just make out the dust in this picture - which is all you can see of the Orion Nebula itself looking back towards the other nebulae, home, and of course the galactic central core.

Then it was on into the Horsehead Nebula itself.

Once 1000 ls away from the entrance star, all space in the Horsehead Nebula just turns pink!

A bit further in now, and once again looking back towards home.

And finally, I made it.  You can't go any further there are no more stars.  I'd expect with an Asp you can jump beyond the back of the Nebula and carry on into interstellar space towards the Crab Nebula - but my journey was at an end. In front of me was the Horse's head.

You can just about make out the horse's head in the game, but the elevation is wrong and you don't see far enough above this band of dark dust to see the horse's neck.  Look behind the dark hump in the clouds above the Clipper's back to see the head shape.  (I do remember reading that they amended the Galactic map to give the Horse Head a little more definition in one of the updates, but its obviously not been applied in here also).

The Spirograph Nebula

First reached by myself on the evening of the 5-APR-3301, the Spirograph Nebula or IC 418 is a planetary nebula 1100 light years from earth and is one third of a light year across.

It was given the name Spirograph after the patterns in the gas seen in enhanced telescopic images taken from Earth resemble the Spirograph toys which you can make pretty coloured geometric patterns with a series of different sized plastic wheels. I had one myself as a kid.

To find it in Elite Dangerous, make your way towards the Witch's Head Nebula then as you reach it hang a left.

The Spirograph Nebula is stunning.  I learned about it from twitch streamer O_Dingo77, who in turn learned about it from one of his viewers Harbinger73 (who's got the discovery credit for the entire system).

The nebula is lit internally by the large B-Type star at the centre BD-12 1172.  It gives off the same UV glow that other blue giants like Beta-1 Tucanae give off too, giving any close objects including the first couple of high metal planets (all with rings) and unearthly purple glow.

Farther away from the central star, the green glow of the nebula really starts to come to life. it even turned my cockpit green.

It made me wonder as I was flying around and scanning the outer system that it life formed and if it ever did reach sentience in this system, they would grow up believing that this greenspace was the norm, and would get quite the shock when they left their home system for the first time and saw the true darkness of space.  It would make a wonderful plot for a sci-fi story!

The B-Class star also has a couple of brown dwarf companions and also a captured M Class star too. Planet 16 is also a hot "Venusian" world and is classed as a terraformable due to the high water content in the atmosphere.  If this is ever settled (although I can't see it happening in my lifetime) I'm bagsy'ing some real estate there now!!!

And of course the backdrop itself makes a wonderful setting to show of the beauty of the Imperial Clipper.  The teal colour of the nebula reminds of of the warm seas of the Caribbean or some other exotic locale.

And finally, looking back from the next jump here is the Spirograph Nebula as it appears from outside (blue fuzzy patch next to the clipper's nose) dwarfed by the ever growing size of Barnard's Loop.

And so, I leave the Spirograph behind as my journey towards Orion continues, I didn't really want to leave the system, but I can't wait until the Alliance Exploration Programme extends this far out and they build a station in this system, it will make a wonderful space tourist destination.... in 500 years we'll have the Spirograph Nebula Hilton :-)