Note: Some of the screenshots in this report suffer from the "blocky" bug that happens when taking high-resolution photographs of bright objects (stars). My apologies for that.

Commanders,

There are surely lots of places in the galaxy that I could recommend to new explorers, even after just one single trip out into the void. But if there is one place that I would call an absolute must-see, then it'd be the "World of Death" or "Monde de la Mort"!

It's located in the system [Spoihaae XE-X d2-9], look for the first planet in the system.

What you'll notice pretty quickly is its highly eccentric orbit, and that's around a white dwarf star!

As lady luck would have it, the 1.12g planet crosses the deadly jet cones of the white dwarf star and even enters its also deadly exclusion zone on it's ≈88 minute orbit.

The challenge? To land on it and get back off of it alive!

There are two problems with that: First, the planet is fast. To land on it safely, it needs to be far away enough for your ship not to encounter thermal problems, but not too far, because then it would enter the jet cone while you're still performing your landing manoeuvre.

Your ship is highly sensitive to the radiation inside the jet cone, and such a thing is generally only survivable while inside a frameshift space bubble. Close to the planetary surface this becomes deadly real quick. When outside of frameshift space, your ship would get murderized by the jet stream pretty quickly.

So there is a very narrow time window that you need to get right! The descend won't be super fast either, this being a moderately high-g world.

In my case, the planet was about to enter the cone on the outer part of its orbit, so I had to play the waiting game for about an hour (time to hydrate yourself a pizza!) before I could finally undertake a landing attempt:

If you're used to moderate-g or high-g worlds, this shouldn't be too hard, as long as you get the timing right. As for the spot to land at, I just picked some place in the well-lit part during the world's travelling away from the star, towards its apoapsis:

Now I was going to make use of the miraculous radiation and temperature resistance that our SRV exhibits, and send our ship away to safety:

Alright, after this it was just me and the deadly environment of this extreme world:

Now that we're here, we'll stay for a bit. Optimally for exactly 88 minutes, right back to the same time window we used for our approach. So make note of the time at approach and landing! It might not be obvious when to take off later, so doing this by the clock might be a good idea.

First comes the passage through the jet cone at the apoapsis. It's an awesome light show with quite some resemblance of the aurora borealis on Earth:

That's the chill phase of the experience. You just sit there in the dark watching the slow-moving light show in the sky while listening to some calming music. Great stuff!

But don't fall asleep, because as the planet approaches its periapsis - the closest point to the star - things happen really, really fast. Like crazy fast! The entire flyby will take only seconds!

Here the deadly white dwarf appears on the horizon:

You'll immediately notice severe gravitational lensing that the photos simply don't do any justice. It's a breathtaking event by all means! The most amazing thing is probably that the planet isn't being torn asunder by the shearing force at this distance and speed, which feels so fast it's unreal:

Now I don't have any photographs of getting bathed in the jet cone at periapsis, because I just had to watch in shock and awe as it happened. Mind you, at the closest point to the star, you'd be only about 18.000 kilometres away! But heh... since that's measured centre-to-centre, the actual closest distance from the surface of the planet to the surface of the star is much less than that!

Given the radius of the white dwarf (≈7.000km) and the planet (≈3.600km) one may come as close as ≈7.400km! Absolutely insane!

Now, after all that excitement, one needs to calm down a bit and be a little patient. Don't rush things! Just count the minutes until you can be sure to be out of the danger zone and not yet in the cone close to the apoapsis.

Then, recall your ship, and get the hell off this world! :)

This makes for the most amazing experience I had in this galaxy so far! If you ever visit the galactic centre and/or Colonia, make sure to pay this place a visit!

You'll experience both the intense thrill of the close flyby and the solemn calm of the far side cone.

It's freaking amazing and beautiful!

You'll love it!

Unless you die, that is... ;)

Commanders,

As a part of my reports for my 1st exploration trip, I shall share some tight multi-star configurations.

A white class F and an orange-yellow class K (if I remember correctly):

A cooler pair consisting of one class M red dwarf and one class L brown dwarf:

Class K yellow-orange pair:

Want more stars? Have three (this looked pretty cool):

Or maybe even four? The two close pairs are orbiting a common barycenter, something I'd seen only twice or maybe thrice so far:

Four stars made the largest near-distance configuration I have seen for now. Would be interesting to see even more stars close to each other. Next step would naturally be five, maybe two pairs orbiting each other with a fifth star orbiting around that? Or another pair to make it six...

It's questionable what I'd see as "close enough" to qualify though. This depends both on distance but also stellar radius, so that it would be ostensibly close enough to "look awesome".

Commanders,

While I'm not done with my retrospective reports for my 1st exploration trip, today I'll present my most recent finding from the very end of that expedition. That was after my return to civilized space.

While it had been discovered already, I still found this very interesting. What I stumbled over was an ancient generation ship, the "Atlas". Frankly, before yesterday I hadn't even known that we'd built such things in the distant past:

Pretty exciting, isn't it? Let's get a bit closer:

Interestingly enough, the rings around the vessel were still rotating, and the ship still had power. Being hundreds of years old, this is nothing short of a miracle!

The thrusters were cold though:

At the front of the vessel sits an enormous disc, whose function wasn't initially clear to me. After pondering this device for a bit it dawned on me... this might have been an extremely primitive deflector shield to protect the ship from micrometeorites. It's fastened to the central shaft of the ship with thick metal cables:

After inspecting the disc, I maneuvered my Diamondback Explorer into the ring superstructure to take a look at the large glass domes attached to the insides of the rings:

Amazingly enough, not only was the ship still powered, but the hydroponics appeared to be bearing life even after all this time. The domes seemed a bit hazy, but maybe that's just due to an accumulation of plant matter and dirt on the inside of the glass. Living trees are clearly visible though! In the background you can see the white dwarf that seems to have caught the Atlas.

After scanning all the ship logs, it became clear what had happened to the ship. Due to a construction error, the massive generation ship could no longer brake. Faced with that situation, the ship's council had approved the plan of the then current generation's chief engineer - a certain Mr. Edwards - to launch their colonization capsules in a risky flyby manoeuvre, letting the ship itself drift off into space.

The logs further indicate the explosion and subsequent loss of one capsule, with the others seemingly having launched just fine though. Also onboard a capsule was Mr. Edwards pregnant wife, which is the grim part of the story, as he chose to stay aboard the mothership to launch and steer the capsules to their target world. The logs also say that the vessel's captain had sword to name their future colony after Edwards. The name of his wife was Jean.

It is unclear to me what happened after that. Edwards most likely died of either old age, sickness or potentially suicide, with the ship's automated systems keeping power and life support up and running.

But what happened to the colonists?

Did Edward's and Jean's kid grow up with dirt under their feet? Or did they all meet nothing but death at the end of their travels?

I do not know...

Commanders,

This is a story of my reaching of the star BD+46 1067 in the centre of the planetary nebula IC 2149. Not that I knew back then what the object I was longing for actually was...

I was out there in the outer arm, at maybe 70% or 80% of my exploration trip #1, when i spotted a pale dot with a halo around it in the sky.

I had known when I'd seen it. I had to go there. No matter what it was. I just prayed it wasn't an extragalactic object, but no, it wasn't at all as I would learn after a few hours, here's a "preview" from the map:

What I did was essentially a kind of poor man's triangulation to verify its nature as an intragalactic object. I would place a bookmark on my current location, and then fly towards the object for a few hundred lightyears in as straight a line as possible, which mostly meant upwards in this case. Then I would set another bookmark, target the first one, put it right at my aft and see whether my target had shifted to any side in front of me, with my starting point exactly behind me.

And indeed, such a shift was measurable! It had to be somewhat close. Using this technique, I managed to extrapolate my course and locate the object on the map, as you can see on the photo above!

But as the object was so high up, and as I wasn't sure whether I could reach it, I requested help from other commanders. Commander Factabulous and Commander Orvidius came to help me plot a route up there!

Ultimately, I didn't follow their routes, but deviated from them though. In the end, they were still a lot of help, and I might not have gotten there without them, so my thanks fly out to you guys! Oh, and also to to Sapyx for clarifying a few things.

Anyway, with that I managed to come closer and closer to my target:

In the meantime, I had spent a few FSD injections, so I decided to stock up on Arsenic and Germanium for materials. Lucky me came across a planet that had both on my way up:

A boring ice world, but it got me what I needed to feel a bit safer! Still, the last hop I made via a somewhat risky Neutron boost:

As for what I found there... let me say it was quite beautiful, almost breathtakingly so!

Here you go:

That was definitely worth it!! And that planetary nebula, which I have visited as its 11th or maybe 12th explorer sparked an interest in planetary nebulae in general in me... and that would make me visit more of its kind.

But first, my encounter with Commander Frillop Freyraum made me yearn for a different place... Xibalba! The farthest and most desolate you can go to! But that's for another report...

Commanders,

In the last report from my travels, I had presented you with an impossible star - a cool, red Wolf-Rayet. But there aren't just stars, but also planets that we seemingly cannot understand yet, worlds that couldn't and shouldn't exist as they are.

One such thing that you may come across out there - although they're quite rare - are water worlds with no atmosphere whatsoever.

Just take a look at this eerie world:

Imagine naked water directly meeting the vacuum of space! It shouldn't be, because at zero pressure, the boiling point of water drops so hard that it would start to do just that - boil. And that would happen until the resulting gas would envelop the surface to enact pressure on it, thus raising its boiling point until the liquid would become stable.

It could also happen that the steam would immediately freeze up, and start to cover the ocean below with solid ice, turning that water world into one with a massive subterranean ocean, like with Saturn's moon Enceladus.

So it is still unclear how this can be. Something mixed into the water that affects the evaporation point? I do not know.

Here, have another photograph instead of an explanation, this one comes with rings:

One could also assume that the steam would be blown away by the solar wind and thus won't form an atmosphere, but I don't think that that works here.

Those worlds all seem to follow a similar pattern; They're large, relatively high g, and they're cool on average. Below the typical freezing temperature of water at 1g pressure. The zero pressure could explain why they're all liquid (even at the polar regions and on the dark side), but it cannot explain the absence of a gas layer.

Them being so cool and so high g means, that the solar wind probably won't be powerful enough to blow the water steam away from the world after evaporation. At least that's what I'm guessing.

An absolute mystery indeed!

Commanders,

There have been many discoveries on my first trip that are noteworthy, but the one that moved me the most for a long while, you know, emotionally, and that I still have fond memories of was my discovery of a somewhat hard-to-reach Wolf-Rayet star. Class WC, to be precise. Expect to need FSD injections even if your ship has 50+Ly of jump range...

It's just that the Wolf-Rayet somehow didn't even end up to be the most spectacular thing in that system though.. but you'll see that in a moment.

I exited close to a hot class O star, so far so good. Then I looked to my starboard side to see that there was another class B star pretty close. The Wolf-Rayet I was after was nowhere to be seen, and I couldn't spot it on my scanner, meaning that it might not be around the central class O. So maybe behind the class B?

Alright, so I thought, I'd just hop over to that class B very quickly to check it out.... which is when I noticed that the star seemingly didn't move relatively to my position.. 10c, 20c, 30c, 40c of speed, and finally I could see some motion. "Holy crap, that star is huge!", I thought.

The Wolf-Rayet was indeed revolving around a common barycenter with the class B star. When looking at the photograph below, please keep in mind that that purple Wolf-Rayet star is already 10 times the size of our sun, diameter-wise!

Just imagine how huge that sub-giant star is! And that's at over 4000 lightseconds of distance. More than a billion kiometres away! Wow.

Let's have a look at the purple ball of fire that is the class WC Wolf-Rayet star:

While it is not perfectly clear whether it's true in case of this star, given the presence of such a huge class B right next door could mean, that this Wolf-Rayet has indeed been entirely stripped of its outer layers, feeding the larger sub-giant with its stellar material. In that case, what we're looking at right there is the stellar core. So here we can probably look directly at pure Hydrogen fusion happening right before our eyes! Awesome.

But still, the thing that excited me the most was that huge class B star...

Here are the size/mass specs of the three (The class O wasn't included in the photos):

Class O5 IVa sub-giant: M☉: ≈102.5, R☉: ≈46.6

Class B7 IVa sub-giant: M☉: ≈61.5, R☉: ≈436.5 (huge!)

Class WC0 I Wolf-Rayet: M☉: ≈53.2, R☉: ≈9.4

Almost got a few galactic records here, close misses. ;)

That was one exciting discovery I tell you!

And here's a bonus feature, an anomaly you could say. An impossibly cool, deep purple-red Wolf-Rayet:

This should be an impossible star.. it is still unclear how such a thing could even exist!

Well then, so much for the Wolf-Rayet stars!

Commanders,

There was a time when I was in the galactic centre and thought I just had to see the view from high up, or deep down. Just to see what the galactic disk would look like from there.

In the end I ended up going both places. Turns out hell isn't all too different from heaven after all. ;)

First, I went up!

Here, the first system I had thought to be the highest I could reach had a hot and young class O star at its centre:

Decided to land on a planet in that system to enjoy the view:

Pretty nice indeed! But then I thought I'd push it a little further using a Neutron star to just boost all the way into absolute blackness - literally as you'll see in a moment:

"Literally", because the central "star" of that system was a black hole, at exactly 3001Ly of height from the galactic disk. This would've been suicidal, if the black hole didn't have yet another Neutron star next to it. So it was possible to Neutron-boost back out of this place:

And this was the highest place I managed to reach, what a vieeew! An entire galaxy to your feet!

with that done, I just had to do the same thing on the other side of the galactic core. From top to bottom!

Where I had managed to reach +3001Ly upwards, I fell slightly short at -2938Ly downwards. A star system with one O0 and two B0 stars makes for a lot of light.

Here it is, the bottom of the world, feels as if the sky could fall on your head any time ;)

(Note: This screenshot has been edited in an attempt to mitigate blocky artifacts - it looks kinda borked still, but I wanted to show you nonetheless...)

Roof and bottom, heaven & hell. You could say I've been to both and am still living to tell the tale of it.

But then again, heaven and hell probably take somewhat different forms in this galaxy, so mere distance from the galactic plane probably doesn't qualify, heh? ;)

Commanders,

This was probably the first photograph I took on my exploration trip #1. Still pretty even now, so please lay your maybe-stressed eyes on this sunset for some relaxation:

I just like worlds orbiting their host stars closely, you know, for the views. And this one made for a reasonable high-g training ground along the way at 1.38g.

One has to stay sharp after all, so yep. Landing on higher g worlds every now and then definitely does that for me. And I won't complain if I get a nice vista along with it!

Commanders,

Rings again! I love rings. But let's uplift the topic a little bit by presenting you with yet another slightly more special discovery from my first exploration trip. This should've been roughly 3 months ago I think.. and at the time, it had my jaw drop!

Can you guess what this could be?

Well, it'd probably still let my jaw drop even today, just have a look at how gorgeous this is:

That's a class M red dwarf star right there, and stars most definitely look much better with rings! Well, any stellar or planetary object does, so yeah. ;)

Let's get closer:

Just wonderful, I tell you! Unfortunately, like the ringed Earth-like world I had mentioned earlier, this was the only one I've found so far. I hope I can see more beauties like this one in the future!

Edit: Right, I forgot to tell you the system name! It's [Greae Flyi AA-A h31].

Commanders,

This one will be short; A very recent discovery from the later part of my 1st trip; A named Neutron star that had not been discovered before my visit. That's a detail I found to be somewhat noteworthy. Well, at least for me.

Here you can see it to my port:

Other than HIP 25704 itself, there wasn't much to be seen there, so I hope you like that photograph of the star!

It was a pretty sight!