Trip to Sagittarius A*

Back in June I began my exploration journey to Sagittarius A* in Elite: Dangerous. I have returned in November and now I’d like to share the awesome stuff I have seen in deep space.

This is a view from around 1500Ly above the galactic plane. A cluster of bright stars can be seen in front of the galactic plane towards the core.

I have visited the black hole in the center of the BLEAE AESCS AA-A H25 Nebula. The black hole distorted the nebula a lot, but it all looked literally like an asshole so I won’t show that here. At least I have managed to take screenshot of the nebula from one of the planets.

Then I have found a planet very close to a white star. After several minutes I managed to get into the right position to the following screenshot.

Then I came across a dense region of massive (class B) stars. Of course if there are massive stars, there are other massive things as well. Very black massive things.

At this point I have encountered several binary stars including couple dangerous jumps where I ended up between the two stars with only moments to spare before temperature reaches critical levels. But binary just was not enough for this star system.

The next thing I found was a planetary nebula. I took several pictures from a planet inside it.

Then I jumped to one of the nearby system and found a blue gas giant for comparison.

But the truly interesting screenshot awaited me on a moon of another gas giant when I realized there’s an eclipse in progress. Since planetary nebulas are only several light-years wide, there are only several systems close enough for this to happen. The chance that there will be a moon orbiting in the right plane is small, so finding an eclipse like this is quite fucking rare.

The next couple thousand light years was dominated by interesting planets.

This ammonia world is so white I didn’t actually recognize it from the system map. Later I found one more like this.

There were many earth-likes up to this point but for some reason this is the first I took picture of.

This earth like has a moon. No simpleton like our moon. This one has mountains. The surrounding stars shine much more brightly, welcome in the core of our galaxy.

This screenshot happened almost by accident. I decided to check surface of a planet for POIs, found none but when I raised my head from looking at the radar, I saw beautiful rings.

Then I encountered the last nebula before Sag A*.

At this point I have finally reached my destination, I stared into the abyss not expecting it to stare back. Is that the eye of terror? I thought we have 26 millennia before it appears.

After basking in it’s glory and horror, I faced the explorer’s decision. Do I journey back with my exploration data, or do I take the shortcut.

Not understanding the gravity of the situation, I simply flew away.

After Sag A* I didn’t set course directly home, instead I started climbing above galactic plane. On the way there I have found a red and green planetary nebula.

Going up turned out to be a great idea, this is definitely one of the best screenshots.

vertical version

Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.”
– Genesis 1:6

I think he didn’t get much farther with this one.

At this point of the journey the tanning season was almost over IRL, so I spent couple minutes on a “beach”.

Another accidental screenshot. I was travelling from somewhere to someplace and this suddenly appeared in front of my canopy.

I have been looking for giants and supergiants for some time by this point, but I didn’t want to post odd screenshot here and there.

Giants are just a ball of superheated matter like any other star, so they look the same as ordinary stars except they are bigger. The size difference is hard to capture.

Yeah, it’s about four times bigger than my ship 😉

To solve this I had to find a giant with an ordinary star in close orbit. The following two guys are both orange stars (spectral class K). The screenshot is taken from distance of about 50Ls from the ordinary star and about 250Ls from the giant.

But there are better examples. The following pair is a bit more diverse and even though they are not as close to each other, I think the rings do help to show the size difference.

The next segment was dominated by hot places.

The first one is another ternary star. Not as spectacular as the first one, but I found a nice angle to take screenshot from.

I tried to take similar screenshot of an MS Star (red giant) near an M star, but…

WARNING: TEMPERATURE CRITICAL

WARNING: TAKING HEAT DAMAGE

So the following screenshot is the best I could do, and it kind of illustrates why the orbit of the M star would be so much hotter.

Speaking of hot places…

Normally when I find a close binary star I try to fly through the gap between them watching how my ship handles the heat. Had to skip this one, just flying near the gap (but outside scooping distance) gave me 94% temperature.

Let’s cool down a bit on a icy body. This one looks particularly icy unlike any other I have seen so far.

By this point I was getting close to Sol. There were still two nice planets to discover though. The first one is an ammonia world with rings. Ammonia worlds are rare on their own (like earth-likes). A ringed ammonia world? All I know is that at least one exists.

The second planet is a gas giant with huge and bright rings.

One of the last points of interests that I visited was a cluster of massive stars (class B and O). In one of the systems I found three black holes with nice gravitational lensing effect. Especially when all three are lined up so that the curving effect is amplified. It is considered a sign of luck when stars align. What does happen when stellar remnants align?

I was getting really close to Sol at this point which also means close to pirate scum. How did I get past that? Well, that’s what Operation Final Approach was about.

During the operation we took one nice screenshot where the fleet stared into Pencil Nebula as Rince docked himself from behind in his ship launched fighter.

So… I guess I should set of for Beagle Point next June, right?