Earth Like Worlds? I'll take two!

My voyage downwards has reached it's end. The mighty Clipper is a beauty to command while I travel these far reaches, but there gets a point where I simply cannot jump the distances required to go any further out.

But my heart is far from heavy, I am thrilled to have picked my way some 2600ly downwards from Sag A*. The view I am greeted with this far away from the galactic plane is breathtaking, with other galaxies and the Magellanic Clouds clearly visible through my canopy.

The star systems through which I wove my route were all very much alike holding a high percentage of K & M type stars orbited by gas giants. So imagine my surprise when a system scan revealed a secondary star with what appeared to be an Earth like world orbiting. Despite being some 500k ls from the primary I pointed my bow towards it and throttled up.

My reward was what I had hoped for.

A stunning earth like world, although somewhat smaller than the home of our ancestors at 0.24 earth masses. Naturally I took a whole bunch of photos before scanning the rest of the orbital bodies, and it was on one of these scans I was glad for my safety harness as I would have fallen out of my chair!

It looked like any other metal rich world, it turned out to be another earth like! This one at 0.95 earth masses and slightly warmer. I could see some big tropical storms around the equator and the polar caps were minimal. Had I been equipped for landing this is where I would have stopped!

There may be other terrestrial worlds further out from the galactic plane, but I can still proudly say I have discovered one on the fringes. It is very peaceful out here, and it was with a slightly heavy heart that I decided to head back away from the fringe.

My journey now takes me further across the galaxy where I hope to pick up the start of the Perseus arm at the core, and track that back around before skipping across to the Orion spur. This is a fair journey and I know there is a chance I will get distracted on the way.

In fact I have already, as I am now en-route to a cluster of neutron stars and black holes that do not appear to be widely charted as yet. Only a few systems from my pair of terrestrial planets, I dropped across another.

Sunrise was rather impressive today.

Rikk, signing off.