After a couple of days at Morgan's Rock, we are ready to return to our journey. Currently heading toward some mysteriously abandoned settlements in the Hawking's Gap...

As soon as we reached the Zero-G bar, we found that new attacks from a mysterious alien civilizations are occurring in the Pleiades. A station in the IP 16753 system, Liman Legacy, was almost destroyed... All are clearly upset and worry about that. It seems that there are no diplomatic efforts at all... how this is possible? After so many centuries, finally we encounter an advanced civilization, even more advanced than us for what we know, and all that happen are skirmish, attacks and war? IS it for real?

Reviewing our Exploration Data, we found that the Orange Giant star we discovered during this trip, HD 76128 A, is worth of four galactic records, not to mention that is one of the giant star cataloged between the XX and XXI centuries, before any interstellar travels was possible and even before any Generation ships!

According to the current galactic registry, HD 76128 A is: the largest, brightest. lowest density and slowest spinning Orange Giant already discovered in the Galaxy!

We safely reached Morgan's Rock, almost at full health. We had just a heat issue with a close encounter entering a multiple stars system; as soon as we enter the system, we found our self too near the second star, right behind us, and in front of us we had the main star, both cooking Nina with no effort at all. It was very difficult to maneuvering, but we had just minor internals damages...

Of course, Nina's paint is a total mess, which is perfectly justifiable, after a trip of 53,997.8 ly, for a total of 1349 jumps!

We need to point toward a station with an outfit section as soon as possible, Nina really deserve a new paint job.

We mapped and charted Thaile AA-A h53, an already discovered yet uncharted wolf-rayet star. Now, heading toward NGC 6188 Sector LC-V c2-28...

We found an uncharted wolf-rayet star not far the route we traced to Morgan's Rock. New Waypoint marked.

So, after a brief meeting with all the crew, we decided that heading toward Morgan's Rock is a good decision. It's not too far our current position (16795.4) and now is still acceptable to deviate, coinciding with the reach of 50K ly of our trip. If we continue to head toward the east side of Centarus Reach, we will be too far away to justify that. There's also the locked NGC 3603 Sector right ahead, so we will have to circumnavigate it.

We can proceed west side, visit Morgan's Rock and maybe some other deep space base, than return to the east side, visiting the four abandoned settlements in the Hawking's Gap and proceeding through the Norma Expanse heading toward the east side of the galactic core, opposite to Colonia. That give us a very interesting journey ahead!

My navigator, Caroline Dumas, is proposing to do a deviation from our previous traced route to visit Morgan's Rock, at NGC 6188 Sector LC-V c2-28. She say that we made to much discoveries which can benefit the human race to risk travel toward Beagle Point before sell them, and having them lost in case of a disaster with the ship. So, some thoughts are needed...

I didn't dislike the idea. Beside Morgan's Rock, there are also the Observation Post Epsilon (Trifid Sector IR-W d1-52) and the Omega Mining Operation (Omega Sector VE-Q b5-15) which I have to visit yet... so, sell the exploration data and give Nina a new paint-job do not seems so bad at all.

We just discovered and mapped a binary black hole system. The main one is a massive singularity, with 14.36 solar masses. The second one is a much common stellar mass black hole, with "just" 4.19 solar masses...

Spectacular gravitational lens effect, as always...

We are currently at 341.02 ly from the nearest previously mapped system.