Space Engine

I'll start where these things always start. Home.

"Blue Marble" indeed.

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
-Stephen Hawking

"There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus... the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. ...in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable."
- Carl Sagan

Venus

Mercury

Mercury 2

Io

Io + Jupiter

Saturn

Europa. I've always found this moon fascinating.

Titan. The Cassini–Huygens probe touched down on this Moon in early 2005. The furtherest man-made object ever to touch down on another body.

"It is, I think, very interesting that we have a world in the outer solar system that is loaded with the stuff of life."
- Carl Sagan

P̶l̶a̶n̶e̶t̶ Pluto

I've included the Dwarf Planets to give context to Pluto.

I would have taken more photos from the solar system but for some reason I caused a hell of a lot of crashes.

"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
-Carl Sagan

Now we are a small bright dot amongst many other small bright dots.

Whoooosh!!!!1!

What follows are miscellaneous photos from around the places I've found.

Eagle Nebula viewed from another angle.

Horse Head Nebula

A volcanic moon orbiting a gas giant near the Helix Nebula.

A tidally locked terrestrial planet (with some life!), near the Crab Nebula.

Notice the permanent cyclone on the equator point.
I see this a lot on tidally locked earth-like planets (and you'll see it in some other photos.
It had never occurred to me but it kind of makes sense with the extreme temperature differences and an equator point that doesn't move. Fascinating stuff.

Note: Before you call it a hurricane, the orientation is wrong but technically Cyclone, Hurrcane and Typhoon would all be wrong according to naming conventions (to the best of my knowledge).

Taken on the planet at the "North/Top" in relation to it's orbit path.

Those regions in the dark have remained dark for billions of years.

The Milky Way + Large Magellanic Cloud

A very large Globular Cluster. Every single one of those yellow dots is a star.

I believe it's called "The Carina Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy"

The Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud as seen from a planet near the edge of the Globular Cluster.

The Andromeda Galaxy. At the top and slightly to the left you can see our galaxy (The Milky Way).

A rather red looking moon. I wonder what those black smudges are.

I turned up the Thermal Imaging, and crap, they're massive storms.

Holy crap, I just realised the light is tinted as it passes through the atmosphere. I'm gonna have some fun with this.

A nice little aurora.

I think this planet is orbiting a little close to its star...

The atmosphere present is probably made up of the evaporating rock.

This thing is probably gonna evaporate away soon.

The light of a dying sun.

Love the detail in the rings.

The view from one moon as it is about to collide with another moon.

Getting closer...

Space Engine doesn't really do collisions so they just kinda pass through each other.

Yeah, scorched desert, at that distance I'm not really surprised.

I found a black hole. Note the awesome gravitational lensing.

"So Einstein was wrong when he said, "God does not play dice." Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
-Stephen Hawking

Red Star + Blue Star gives a purple sky.

I noticed a solar eclipse was happening so I quickly took a photo. Note the Corona. The other bight dots are other closer planets.

The black dot on the gas giant is the shadow from this moon. Neat.

Another tidally locked Earth-like.

Who needs a sun when you have a couple of Globular Clusters of thousands of suns just over there?

You are here...

Sagittarius A*
The supermassive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy.

This image doesn't do its insane size justice.

There, that's better. This image was taken at 1 AU (astronomical unit).
That's the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Go back and look at the second photo in this album. That's that same distance as that images was taken from the Sun...

The orbital paths of the stars orbiting the black hole.

For scale the size or the orbiting stars. Our Sun is slightly smaller than S3.

A reverse eclipse. A massive star passing in front of the black hole.

Blue Rings!

A nice little lava flow.

By the light of a dying star.

On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation) Stephen Hawking smiled and said: "I'm working on that."

Tadpole Galaxy

So... how far away from home am I?