altspace.net

Having watched Ghost Giraffe’s video from their trip to a system 16,000 lightyears outside of the Galactic Plane, I wondered what was actually out there. I caught the name of the system from the video, and went to look it up.

At first glance it looks rather empty. Did they remove it? But wait a minute, when I looked it up, the map display actually went somewhere!

I tried zooming in, zooming out, picking angles at random, as well as restarting the game and rebooting my computer. Then I tried going elsewhere and then looking it up again, and what do you know, for just a moment something flashed up, yet disappeared almost immediately. If I had blinked, I would have missed it.

After many attempts at pressing PrintScreen at precisely the right moment, I got this! Just a tiny, little hint of information. Not much, but definitely an indication, a confirmation, that something was indeed there. Intriguing!

A few screenshots later, and I got a bit more. There was definitely more to this empty place in the dark than was immediately apparent.

(You may notice that this shows a different distance. I gathered these screenshots from several locations, and selected the best of them to put here.)

And then …

This was what I had seen flash by faster than the speed of what the heck was that. A whole group of stars, just one short of a dozen. They weren’t visible other than for that barely perceptible fraction of a second. You can trawl the surrounding space for any distance, in any direction, and you will see no more stars.

So what is this? A small, local cluster, with no connection to the rest of the galaxy? Or are they just a precious few of a myriad, or a thousand myriads of secret stars, rendered invisible, forming a path of hyperspace jumps back to the plane, and to civilisation? Are there more clusters like this one? Questions abound, but answers do not. Well, admittedly I haven’t looked very hard yet.

But it smells of adventure.

Fly safe!

CMDR inshadowz