Welcome to my Space Art hub! All planetary renderings presented here are to scale (1 unit in POVray = 1 km or 1000 km) so you're getting pretty realistic views of the planets below! If you're interested in drawing space art yourself (either on paper or computer), or just want to see more great pictures, then do check out David Hardy's Space Art pages - Dave Seal's Solar System Simulator is also well worth a look too. Starfields were generated using the excellent Universe for Win95. Lens Flares were produced using Nathan Kopp's Lens Flare #include (a must-have for POV Space Art!). Simply click on the thumbnails below to see the full-size (640x480x16 million colour) versions of the images here.

Venus

Cytherea - I've seen many an artist's impression of what Mars would look like if it had water on it, but personally I've always wondered what a water-covered Venus might look like. Then it dawned on me that I could find out using POVray, and I think the result is pretty impressive! This is the view about 19,000 km above central Aphrodite Terra - a large vaguely scorpion-shaped equatorial highland region on Venus. The large arcuate structure on the southern edge of the 'continent' (just visible under the clouds) is Artemis Corona. I have made the map of Cytherea and the Venus Heightfield/DEM used to create it available on my Planetary Maps Hub if you'd like to use them. Note the atmosphere is visible in this image just for effect - realistically you shouldn't be able to see it at this distance!

Here's a quick summary of how I did it: I rendered a global topography map of Venus (available on the Cytherea page of my Planetary Maps Hub) as a heightfield object viewed from high above with a shadowless light source behind the camera, and a blue plane (the water) set at a water_level of 0.3. I then projected my Earth cloudmap over it (still rendering onto a planar surface), cut out the result with Photoshop and projected that onto a sphere, adding Galen Raben's Atmosphere code (see Tips 'n' Tricks) and a starry background for extra effect. Note that the land colours aren't real, they're just a POV texture (Rusty_Iron) added for a bit of variety. Point is, the map construction was all done entirely within POVray!

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Earth and Moon

Earthrise Moonrise over Britain PSRG Logo VGRG Logo

Earthrise - a view of a crescent Earth rising behind the Moon - the Sun was rendered using Nathan Kopp's Lens Flare include. This was designed to grace the cover page of the UK Planetary Forum website - it's basically just my little homage to '2001'... 8) Moonrise over Britain - Another one done for the UK Planetary Forum - hopefully this image should be appearing on a booklet they're producing to promote planetary research in the UK. This image highlights Galen Raben's neat 'planetary atmosphere' effect detailed on the Tips 'n' Tricks page. Planetary Science Research Group Logo - A logo I designed for the Planetary Science Research Group here at Lancaster, of which I am a proud member. It's a simple image with the Moon in the foreground, the Earth in the background, and the Lancaster University logo tastefully plastered all over the lunar farside 8). Volcanology and Geohazards Research Group Logo - One of my planetary landscapes, this was designed for the Volcanology and Geohazards Research Group here at Lancaster University - the gimmick being that the lava flows roughly form the shape of the university logo. The heightfield was created using Terrain Maker for DOS, and a red lightsource was also placed in the volcanic vent to simulate the glow of lava. I'm rather proud of this image, I think it's come out very nicely!

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Mars

Mars from Deimos - This is my first serious attempt to use Heightfields to render some planetary landscapes, created using the excellent Terrain Maker for DOS. This is the view of Mars from its outermost satellite Deimos, now updated with the new (more realistic) Mars map that can be found on my Planetary Maps hub.

Blue Mars - Not content with Cytherea alone (see above), the next step was to render an ocean-covered 'Blue Mars' (it even has pole caps, though you can't see them here!). The image was constructed in the same way as Cytherea, and is a view from 120 km above Mars' innermost asteroidal moon Phobos. You can download this map and the topography map used to create it from the Blue Mars page on my Planetary Maps Hub.

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Views of the Jovian System

The Voyager fly-bys

Voyager 1 at Ganymede - This 'test rendering' of my ultra-realistic Voyager for POVRay model shows a 30-degree view of Voyager 1 at Ganymede, as it was at 01:28 GMT on March 6th 1979. The camera is 50 metres away from Voyager and the spacecraft is 123,935 km from Ganymede, approximately 10,000 km before closest approach. This scene was rendered using Björn Jónsson's rather incredible Ganymede map (as far as I can tell, it's currently the most accurate on the web, and it's in [simulated] colour as well!), David Seal's Solar System Simulator to 'reverse-engineer'/check the scene and get the distance to Ganymede (try it yourself!), and the limited label data from the image taken by Voyager 1's wide-angle camera at closest approach - I have included that very image here, so that you can see the view from Voyager 1 itself at that very moment! Bear in mind that this is just the wide-angle view (I think the wide-angle camera has an FOV of ~3.5 degrees) - there are also narrow angle views that have a better resolution.

Views of Jupiter from its satellites - 'Galilean Landscapes'

Jupiter from Io	Jupiter from Europa	Jupiter from Ganymede

Jupiter from Io - My second attempt at making Planetary Landscapes (the first was the view of Mars from Deimos above) is a view of Jupiter from its volcanic moon Io, with a lava flow-front in the foreground. Sulphur dust in the sky erupted from the many volcanoes on the satellite serve to tint the sky red and also scatter light from Jupiter. Two other moons are also visible in the image - Europa is the disk to the left of Jupiter, while Amalthea (the next moon in from Io) is visible as a tiny red dot over Jupiter's dark side. The heightfield was created using Terrain Maker again, and modified using its 'lava' feature - note that it's not actually based on a real location on Io. I've also updated it to use the new Cassini-based image_map of Jupiter constructed by Björn Jónsson, available from my Planetary Maps Hub. (Amusing sidenote - when I first constructed this image back in 1996, it took about 8 hours to render on my Cyrix 133 because of the dust scattering. The new version you see here is pretty much the same, and took only 5 minutes to render on our 900MhZ PC back home!)

Jupiter from Europa - This is a view of Jupiter hanging over the eastern horizon of the ruptured, icy surface of Europa. All the other Galilean satellites are actually present in this image but they're generally lost among the stars. Again, this image has been updated to use the new Cassini-based Jupiter map from my Planetary Maps Hub (and it's got a better looking lens-flare on it too).

Jupiter from Ganymede - This is a view of a 'New Jupiter' rising over the ancient surface of Ganymede. A crescent Europa is visible to the bottom right of Jupiter (just above Ganymede's horizon), and is illuminating the dark side of Jupiter. This is also the view from the observation window of the Secret Lair of Evil Dr Ganymede - I picked this spot because Jupiter's nice and close to the horizon ;-).

Jupiter and its satellites - 'The Galilean Suite'

The following images are various views of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). As with the Europa Landscape, the other moons are visible in most of the images, but they're generally lost among the stars. These images have now been updated and now use the Galilean maps (he has all four satellites) from Björn Jónsson's site, which are vastly superior to anything else out there - most scientists don't have them this good yet! (Note that the Jupiter map has not been updated yet, I'll get round to this soon!).

I'm particularly fond of the 'Night on Io' image, which shows the a new volcanic plume erupting on the thin crescent limb of Io. Clouds of ionized sulpur dioxide glow faintly above the Ionian equator (these were first observed in 1999 by the Galileo Orbiter), while lava erupting from Prometheus and other active volcanoes glows orange on the unlit surface of the satellite. In the background looms a massive Jupiter, which would appear nearly thirty times as large in the sky as the Moon from Earth to an observer standing on Io. The nightside of Jupiter is dimly visible, illuminated by light reflected from Io, and flashes of lightning are visible in vast thunderstorms in its atmosphere.

Io Europa Ganymede Callisto Night on Io Europa & Ganymede Ganymede & Callisto Callisto

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Alien Worlds...

Distant Sun - A hypothetical ringed Neptunian gas giant and its three satellites orbit a distant orange star. This will be the cover image for The Practical Planetologist's Handbook - a long-term project of mine that allows the user to design realistic planetary systems.

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