THE DRIFT FLEET

Who: Clay Terran and the Merry Fleet
Broadcast: Yes!
Action: Blue Nebula Museum
When: Today!

[Okay, out of all the planets and stations and everything that they've been to? This is, by far, Clay's favorite.

He's in the Blue Nebula Museum, though the camera doesn't show him at first. Instead, it shows one of the many views from the deck, where several nebulae can be seen, all of them within different ranges and distances from each other. The camera shakes a little, and there's an excited noise before the feed stops.

Then it starts up again, this time from a different deck. There's more nebulae from here, and that excited noise from before turns into an ecstatic little laugh as he turns the camera back around, showing his happy face before he turns it once more to look at the nebulae again.]

Are you guys seeing these things?!

I've never seen so many nebulae within viewing distance, and there's even more when you look through the telescope! Do you guys know what this means? Do you know just where we are?

We're in the middle of the deaths and rebirths of stars!

Have you heard the whole legend of the phoenix, where when a phoenix dies, another one rises from its ashes? Stars are just like that! When a star dies, it becomes a nebula just like this, and then a new star, or even several thousand stars are born within it! This whole process takes millions of years, so we're not going to see any stars form here, but the fact that we're seeing all this is incredible!

And we're at the perfect spot for this: close enough to see them with the naked eye, but not enough to be near the awesome forces within it! Inside a nebula is a constant source of pressure, because stars are formed by the force of gravity compressing the light atoms in the nebula until they start to fuse together. This causes an outward, nuclear radiation that can eat away at other protostars trying to form within the nebula, so their newborn lives are just as perilous as the ones we know! If they can survive all this, they can even form planets! So right now, we're looking at a star nursery that was formed from the ashes of another star!

It's a miracle that we survived being inside one for as long as we did, because – just imagine all these forces being like a violent storm on the ocean, only multiplied by the thousands. Isn't it amazing?! We get to see these without worrying about our lives or anything like that! These are the closest I've ever seen them, though I'm still trying to calculate just by how much, but - from this distance, the magnitude of what we're seeing really is incredible!

And did you know all the colors mean something, too? They all indicate what the dying star was made out of! A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust from the previous star, emitting their own or reflecting light from other nearby stars, which makes the colors appear! Red is from the hydrogen, green is from the oxygen, and when they reflect light, which means that the nebula is primarily made of dust, the red light goes through while the blue light gets scattered, so that's why they look blue! And –

[And he'll likely go on and on like this. For anyone who's actually in the museum, Clay can be seen going from deck to deck, looking at the nebulae with awe and furiously writing notes as he looks through the telescopes. Astronomer at work here, proceed with caution!]