Well it's been a while between posts, but that's because I have wandered into the 21 Zeta Cephei system.
A precis, travelogue type!
21 Zeta Cephei system is dominated by its sun, a red super giant of 9o Sol radii, it ejects coronal masses in abundance;
Quite remarkable to watch, I wonder what it's like to fly through one of those?
On entering the system the first thing you will see, well apart from the giant burning ball of gas in your face of course, will be the gas giants lined up like so many brown bowling balls, with rings, brown bowling balls with rings, and swirling atmosphere, round bowling balls with rings and swirling atmosphere;
I was really wondering how to title this report, because once you get past the sun and the gas giants there really isn't much of interest. Of course there are moons, many, many moons. In fact many, many small moons. There are 25 moons in the system, 24 of them landable, 23 of them under 1000klm radius. Ideal you would think for exploration, but it turns out to be a system of uninteresting moons.
There's 1 A, 178 klm in radius, brown with a few craters;
4 B, 162 klms in radius, slightly egg shaped, but also brown with a few craters;
4 C, 155 klms radius,and yes you guessed it, brown, with craters, although it did have a mildly interesting group of splash craters, but it was dark on that side when I got there so I couldn't really build up my enthusiasm enough to wait around for 8 or so hours for it to get light to explore them;
And them we get to 4 D, 183 klms in radius and yes you guessed it, brown with craters as you can see from the first screenshot!
In fact the most interesting moons turned out to be 4 A, at 201 klm just 1klm to large to make it into this little screed of mine. It took about ten hours and two visits but I finally found some vulcanism so it gets an honorary mention, it makes the system worth visiting. There are two other moons 1 B and 4 E that also just exceed my size limit and another two moons under 500 klm radius.
The question is why just gas giants and small moons? What happened to all the roughly earth sized planets? Well the answer is of course that the planets and moons we see used to be the outer solar system, when the star expanded into its red super giant phase it absorbed all the closer orbiting planets and moons, leaving just the outer system gas giants with their collection of small moons. So imagine Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars being absorbed into the sun as it expands later in its life cycle to a red super giant leaving just Jupiter and and the other gas giants, and there you have 21 Zeta Cephei. Of course our sun not being massive enough may not expand into a red super giant, just a red giant, leaving a scorched earth and singed mars as well as the outer gas planets.
Well that's 21 Zeta Cephei for you, a series of small and uninteresting moons with a ringer thrown in!
![[VR] optimal_909](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/109/109067.jpg?1553781733){kind=avatar}
