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.
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).
