What's the time for a 10KLY run, anyway?
The time for the return leg was approximately "the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack", "This Packed Funeral" (World/Inferno), "Acoustic Skunk Anansie Live in London", "Fantasies" (Metric), "Batard" (Stromae) and "Filth & Fire" (Mary Gauthier), plus some quiet time.
I was jumping fast but the ship is general purpose rather than optimised for exploration so I had to go out of my way a lot - there's quite a bit of dark space between Sol and where I was going.
The journey was a trip out to NGC 6231 then a detour to various points of interest on the way back. The cluster makes for an interesting sight on approach - it starts becoming visible from about 2000 light years away.
It's a little difficult to take shots of it though because when you're away from the stars and the cockpit dimming fades out, all the background stars (and the Milky Way) start to obscure the sight.
Here's a shot from right next to a star:
I'm interested in the way that different regions have different initial mass functions - I did an in-depth survey of a series of consecutively numbered areas down in Empire space where every star of two dozen was a red dwarf, but there are all sorts of different trends - once we move out of gamma I'll probably put more time into that, the way the galaxy is modeled fascinates me.
