If you were lucky enough to take a trip to an extrasolar system you might just see a scene similar to the one shown above. Produced using both Blender 2.46 and Photoshop CS2 it shows how the outer planet of the HR 8799 system may look as viewed from the surface of a an orbiting frozen moon.

As you may be well aware HR 8799 was one of the first extrasolar systems along with Fomalhaut b to be captured by using direct imaging. Located some 129 light years away from Earth in the constellation Pegasus the planetary system around HR 8799 contains three massive planets known as HR 8799 b, c, and d as well as an outer debris disk much like the Kupier belt in our own solar system.

To create this alien scene Blender was used to generate the terrain as well as some of the cloudy atmosphere while the ringed gas giant and the smaller orbiting moon were created in Photoshop with the addition of some more cloud. Both images were then composited to produce the final render.

[Image, and post edited: 20.05.09: This has been an image that has evolved since I first rendered it using Blender. To be honest I was never very happy with the original image; it lacked depth, and felt inorganic. It was a couple of months later that I decided to refine what I had produced, and while I was reasonably happy with the results I wasn't eagerly keen on them either. This time around I decided to start completely from scratch, and work solely in Photoshop CS2. Looking at it now I feel that it has all been well worth the extra work, and effort.]

Tags: Extrasolar Planet, Fomalhaut b, HR 8799, Photoshop

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Astro Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.