Inspired by my short lunar jaunt over as well as around the lava flows and craters of the Mare Imbrium last week, I thought it would be fun to produce a 3d map in Blender. Unlike the MOLA (Mars Orbilter Laser Altimeter) data that you can easily lay your hands on for producing renders in Blender and Terragen, no such lunar data is available for download as far as I am aware. This meant I was forced to improvise using a NASA photograph that I processed in Photoshop and then used to generate a height map in blender. It’s not 100% precise, but it’s a good enough facsimle so that the major landmarks can still be made out. Anyway, it was fun to produce and perhaps it might even be of some use.
Tags: Blender, Mare Imbrium, Moon
Posted in Astro Art | 4 Comments »
The weather for the past few days has been predictable i.e. cloudy and wet, so no observations at all. Then again, I’m glad I don’t live on Venus. With an atmospheric pressure 92 times that of the Earth, thick dense clouds of carbon and sulfur dioxide blanketing the sky and a surface temperature of 460°C, I think I’d find it a tad uncomfortable.
Like Mars, Venus is a planet that has intrigued the human race for centuries. It has been suggested that Venus had substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface and an atmosphere similar to Earth’s at one point. The evaporation of that same liquid water and the effects of thermal inertia produced a runaway greenhouse affect that created the planet we see today.
While this planet is a heat seared oven, it certainly is a beautiful sight to behold in the evening sky. The render above was one I created a while back in my favourite 3d app, Blender 2.46 . A real image of the Venusian cloud cover was used to texture and bump map the planet.
Observations of Venus are off the menu at the moment for me. Unfortunately my view of the low horizon in the west is blocked by houses so good evening views of Venus won’t be available until closer to the end of the year. For the moment, I’ll have to content myself with my Blender renders instead of the real thing.
Tags: Blender, Venus
Posted in Astro Art | No Comments »
Clouds, clouds and More clouds! The weather up here in Scotland really has not been the best and I have been unable to undertake any observations since last Thursday’s (28.08.08) exceptionally clear night. So, since the weather hasn’t been all that great I decided that I would share some of my 3d Mars renders that I have been working on over the last several weeks.
I’m sure you’ll agree, Mars is a pretty popular planet at the moment and it is fast become a hotbed of new discoveries and breakthroughs. The subject of intense scrutiny - we send probe after probe to this dusty red planet in a desperate attempt to peel away the closely guarded secrets that Mars has held on to over the decades.
The search for water has become a priority not just for Martian exploration but for future space missions that will be sent to the far flung corners of the solar system, for the simple reason that where you find water, you usually find life. Mars certainly has water, in the form of dry ice, but did this ancient world support liquid water at some point in it’s distant past and does Mars still support liquid water that is possibly locked away deep under the Martian surface? The fundamental question though that is at the forefront of the scientific communitys’ mind is undoubtedly: is there life on Mars? The answer to that question: only time will tell.
The image above was rendered in Blender 2.46 and shows Mars around the end of the Noachian epoch - a phase in the geological formation of Mars between 4 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. It was during this epoch that the oldest existing surface features of the planet were formed. Extensive water flooding may also have occurred late on in the period which helped shape the surface of Mars that we see today. Whether this water flooding happened or not is still a point of contention and there are various theories concerning the early and present hydrology of the planet, but it certainly is tantalizing to imagine how this kind of Mars might have looked all those billions of years ago.
Whether Mars does or did harbor some sort of primitive life is another matter. If the promise of life on another world in our solar system can be fulfilled then it would put our place in the universe in a whole new context. It would mean that the possibility of life elsewhere in our galaxy is not just a plausible idea, it is a very real one. With the large number of exo-planets that have been discovered in recent years, surely there has to be life out there somewhere.
Tags: Blender, Mars, Noachian Epoch
Posted in Astro Art | No Comments »
