Full Wallpaper View : 1024x768   

Hi Gang,

Scientists have just discovered a sun similar in size to ours called Upsilon Andromedae located 13.5 parsecs from earth.  In orbit around this sun are three massive planets named A, B, and C.  Planet A is ¾ the mass of Jupiter, planet B is at least twice the mass of Jupiter, and planet C is four times Jupiter’s mass.  This is a fantasy picture of a possible moon of planet B.  Planet B has an orbit that swings from about 72,000,000 miles to 93,000,000 miles.  Would the moon be able to support life-maybe.  Probably not what is pictured but it is artistic license.  Jan

 

Scenery, Diplodocus (courtesy of Dedicated digital.com)  and  planet are stock  in VUE 5, the planet is actually Venus without it’s cloud cover. That rendering time was about 5 minutes.

 

That picture was saved as a tiff and brought up in PaintShop Pro ver 7 for postwork

The ship is my creation and done in Raydream 3D rendered out as a tiff (took about a minute) and imported into PSP as a new layer.  Since PSP as an alpha channel, it was easy for me to make a mask so that only the model came out.

 

Post work:  Ship’s color and shading had to match that of the scenery etc so had to balance everything-more or less.  Added a couple of additional moons.

 

I have found that it is faster to import stuff into PSP for post work than it is to load everything into VUE 5.  Jan

 

Edited by JanL

Wow Jan!  I really like this. Very cool indeed.

cute dino.... nice work ! might wanna bloom the ship a bit ;)

Fab! Fab! Fab! I am nearly addicted for such landscapes. Such pictues give an inkling of the possible wonders which space offers to us – if we were only be technically able to discover them in the future. You managed the integration of the ship into the landscape very good. Maybe the transition from mountains to the waterplan is a little bit too sudden; a plant-covered shore would look nice. But all in all: great!

I could jump up and down about how it's Upsilon Andromedae not Epsilon Andromedae, the planets are called b,c and d (not A, B and C) and how the middle planet of the system is at temperatures similar to Mercury thanks to its more powerful sun, but I'm not going to, because that would make me a tedious pedant...

I like this image, I like the lighting which gives a pleasant sunset mood. Perhaps a less barren landscape would be more appropriate if you are trying to convey the impression of a living world. The details on the ship are great, though some signs of rocket exhaust (or some other kind of exotic propulsion system) would give the impression that the ship isn't just falling out of the sky or something. The planet in the sky is well done, not too garish in its colouration. You do have a star visible through the bulk of the planet's nightside however, although I suppose this could be some kind of super-lightning-storm or something...

So aside from those tedious realism points which I haven't mentioned, good image.

Hi Derek, thanks for the compliments

Hi Stefan, thanks-I was thinking of blooming the ship, but didn't. I'll try it and see.

Hi Reimund, thanks for the compliments. there is a tree line by the shore-shows up in bright day time.  However in this lighting, it doesnt show up too well. In fact the tree line goes up quite away (just flooded with sunset tones).  However, let me raise the mountain range a bit and see what happens.

Hi Chaos, thanks for the compliments.  Errr, Aww, what E? .

I got my unfo from Popular Science magazine July 1999 issue.  The author of that article states that the planet's are named A, B, and C with planet A having the orbit that is approximately 8 times closer to its sun than Mercury is from ours and obits its sun in less than 5 days.

Planet B, the one represented here is elliptically "eccentric" and takes about 250 days to orbit the sun.  It's orbit goes from about that of Venus to that of Earth-that's where I taking artistic license with the terrain, water etc.  Planet C takes 1,200 days to orbit its star and orbits about where our asteroid belt is located.

The sun itself is slightly larger that Sol.  However, you are right, it is more massive and glows three times as brilliantly as ours.

The two "stars" represented here are actually other moons with one of them coming around the dark side of Planet B.  

I realize that Planet B's swing and the moon distance from the massive Planet B would probably be a hot barren chunk of rock, but I'm tired of making just plain old rocks and if the producers of StarGate1 can get away with it-so can I.      Jan

Edited by JanL

Chaos is right... it's Upsilon Andromedae that is the host star....

Epsilon is a G8III orange giant star ;)

I know, the spelling was wrong on my part,(Epsilon instead of the correct spelling Upsilon)

As for the planets' names,that's why I referenced my source in case things were not correct-the article I read was six years old.

I did a google search on Upsilon Andromedae which may or may not be correct, temperature about 6000 Kelvin with a radius 60 percent larger than Sol and a class F (F8) ordinary dwarf.

Ref: www.astro.uiuc.edu/sow/upsand.html

NP, JanL, now do the Epsilon system with the orange giant .... I am curious how that would look ;)

Keep up the great work

I think I would be curious to see what it would look like from Planet d or Planet 3 or Planet C (depending on what article you read).  I'll need to get the sizes of the planets (since mass and size is definitely not the same).  But off hand I'm thinking UA would be 4 pixels in diameter maybe less and planets one and two, one pixel (since I can't split a pixel) each and a lot of gas for planet 3 or d, or C viewed from that planet.  Of course there is the old poster method where the sizes are to scale and the distances not. Need to go out for a long walk groan.  Jan