Waypoint 5: Blue Oyster Bar Geysers

22 Apr 2022

Greetings, LS3 CMDRs!

Well, that sure was a crazy week, right?! We found numerous wonderful and awe-inspiring objects and have advanced humanity’s knowledge of the Milky Way. We also played it safe and didn’t elect to have a mass rebuy on the Planet of Slightly Lesser Death!!!

Many of you will have had firsts this week. This may have been your first time visiting a DSSA FC. Or your first time discovering an ELW. Far many of you will have been to your first set of Guardian Ruins this week. These remnants of the past teach us that everything great must end and that it is our duty to preserve as much of our knowledge as we can!

This upcoming week will undoubtedly see many more firsts as well. This week we will visit a puzzlingly young Hypergiant and an absolutely ancient Hypergiant. We will end the week at an Oyster Bar!!

Astute CMDRs will have noticed that our Waypoint numbers have skipped ahead, this is not by accident. EDSM counted Hajangai as Waypoint 1 and it’s becoming a bit unwieldy behind the curtain, so we’ve opted to simply jettison the number 4 out of Mo’Deans airlock. Rest assured, we have not skipped an actual Waypoint, we have only shifted the numbers forward to match EDSM.

As always, Expedition Leadership wishes you safe flights and many findings!

Photo by “Limp Bzkit” MorallyGreyArea

POI 1: Aura

System: Grea Dryue AA-A h64

Aura is a trinary system, consisting of an A-type hypergiant of 370 solar radii and two O-type stars. The system is also extremely young, just less than a million years old. This bears the question how a hypergiant of this magnitude could form in that short span of time. One theory is that Aura was already a massive star at its birth, that due to its mass has accreted the surrounding gas, whereas the two O-type companions were themselves massive enough to withstand Aura’s massive gravitational pull. The theory is incomplete, however, and not without inconsistencies. Whatever the case, Aura easily outshines the neighborhood and is visible for at least a thousand light years, posing as a beacon for pilots exploring the Cygnus constellation.

POI 2: Tummartu

System: Eussownst AA-A h0

Sitting some 950 light years above the galactic plane, Tummartu, the “Sons of the Winds”, comprises a binary system of an extremely heavy Wolf Rayet star and an A-type hypergiant some 440 times as large as Sol and on the brink of becoming a red supergiant. The WR star is only 4 times as large as Sol but holds an unbelievable 98 solar masses. Much of the star’s outer layers must have been blown away by extreme solar winds, laying bare the heavyweight oxygen core. This core will probably end in a supernova in the next few million years, which will in turn slam into its by then red supergiant companion, quite possibly tearing this one apart, too.

Waypoint 4: Blue Oyster Bar Geysers

System: Drojai MC-B d1-35

Originally a base camp for the German Expedition (Pioneers and Explorers), the Blue Oyster Bar is a small patch of blue landscape amidst the larger pink surface of the moon. The vicinity is littered with hundreds of high-pressure sulfur water geysers, some of which are powerful enough to jettison an SRV 5km above the surface. The Blue Oyster Bar Geysers is a compelling location of vivid colors within the desolation of the Via Maris region. Nearby is the far bridge, a stellar bridge for shorter-range ships to reach the Formidine Rift.

April 24th Meetup

Meetup Location: Orbital Body B4 in the Prai Hypoo GF-E c10 system. We will meet at Guardian Ruins 1.

RegionMeetup TimeMass Jump Time
Europe1900 UTC2000 UTC
Americas2300 UTC0000 UTC

o7, Commanders!