Imagery of an Astero Fungi Cluster
A very fruitful day. I managed to salvage a waterlogged imager from the wreck of the Cabot not long ago. I didn’t have high hopes that it would contain anything useful, as it had been in the water since I scuttled the ship. Much to my surprise, the seals on the storage medium were largely intact. I risked some of the remaining battery in my working imagers and was delighted to find this. This is a fully grown astero. While there is no good sense of scale in the image, these fungi can grow to over 3 meters. In the foreground you can see a couple of young astero, their cap arrays still curled inward. The stand of torchplants nearby gives a rare chance to see the astero in relatively well-lit detail. Sadly there is some image degradation that my imager was unable to correct.
Some of the file meta information was corrupt, but from what I can tell, this image was taken by poor Crewman Davis. In fact, this may even be the astero that killed him when it released its spores. Little did he know the chain of events his autopsy would set in motion. I forced my one working printer to accept my handmade paper to print this image. It made alarming noises. I am unsure whether I will be able to print images again. Any future explorers may have to content themselves with my amateurish attempts at art
I need to make studying the life cycle of the astero a priority. I know the effects (at least partially) of the spores, but I need to discover what causes the astero to release them. There are areas of the swamps I simply cannot explore at present without knowing more.
Perhaps this should take precedence over the glowlies.
Archivists Note: The image above is, in fact, the image we have adopted for the project portal that the viewer would have seen when they first arrived. Our image scrubbers are naturally far more effective than those available to the original author. We have included the image in its discovered, somewhat degraded state here.