Rushing through outer space at one third of the speed of light is very dangerous, for more than one reason. Care must be taken when deciding which path to travel on, as to not trace it through a star's core or right into a solid, rocky planet. In our case though, the course was laid out by the superheated gas cloud emitted from the hull of an exploding star. And those are not exactly known for their navigational precision...
A few hundreds years later.
Due to a considerable amount of luck, our path leads close by a blue giant star, about 700 light years away from our sun and about a hundred thousand times brighter. Thanks to its gravitational field, the trajectory of our journey is slightly altered. This little deviation though changes things dramatically, since when dealing with astronomical speeds and distances, a few arcseconds of course correction mean that the travel ends in a different quadrant of the galaxy...
A millennium later.
Our course leads us into the blue clouds of the Pleiades nebula. Striking through the dust and avoiding the Seven Sisters and any other celestial body in the cluster, we look around. Blue is the only visible thing. Blue from everywhere, from the stars, from the debris reflecting their light. For more than a century blue is the only thing around. It can seem like an eternity, or like a second. When breaking free from the cloud, a spectacular vortex of gas forms behind us, obscuring a part of the black, white-speckled background before the void of space engulfs us once more...
Some centuries later.
Continuing our travel, the universe gives us another demonstration of its wild beauty. While passing through a giant molecular cloud, a small bright spot can be recognized in its center, where the beginning gravitational collapse of matter onto itself will lead, in a few million years, to the birth of a new star. Will it become a superhot giant, violently burning its fuel and lasting for just a few million years? Or will it rather be a red dwarf, much less powerful, yet lasting longer than the age of the universe? The answer to this is to remain unknown, as the travel is leading us somewhere else...
Some years later.
The seemingly eternal darkness is cast away for many years as we pass through an extended H II region. There is so much light here, more than any star could ever give off on its own. Light comes from everywhere, in every intensity, in every color. Being reflected back and forth, it grows in intensity and becomes focused so much that it almost seems like a lighthouse for those ships that are lost in space...
A few decades later.
There is nothing but debris around when the journey leads us through the atmosphere of Jupiter, the largest of the gas giants in the Earth's solar system. With the gases of the planet becoming denser while piercing through its lower atmosphere, our traveling speed is reduced to a more human-acceptable value. Some seconds later we emerge from the planet on its other side, headed toward the Sun.
Some minutes later.
We pass by the Sun close to its chromosphere, speed past it and continue onward. Now, traveling at only few kilometers per second, our journey is coming to an end as we meet a large object hovering in space. A large, solid object.
