Celestia Forums

I've always felt that everyone's favourite kind of planet could be rendered in a more realistic way. Certainly in my mind's eye hot Jupiters have an appearance that makes them appear to be very warm places, very close to the star. Celestia has a number of limitations to rendering them the way I imagine they should look like, so in an effort to overcome some of these, I've created a simple add-on that toys around with what Celestia does allow us to do.

The night-side appearance of the planet is "boring." Slowly rotating giant planets are expected to have very few bands, and hot Jupiters are expected to have equatorial super-rotating jets. The day-side appearance is even more "boring." But what's interesting about the dayside is that, due to the planet's proximity to the star, it is more than half the actual surface of the planet.

Just extract the .rar file into your /extras/ folder and go to "HotJupiterHost" in Celestia.





FAQs:
Q: "Goodness this is terrible."
A: Yeah I know.

This is literally the most genius thing I have ever seen.

Agreed, this is pretty amazing. Illuminating more than half of a planet would be a useful feature for Celestia. I think it would be rather trivial to calculate, but I'm not sure.

Now obviously if we were going with strict realism, then this would be an impossible view because the stars would blind us. But in my opinion it is nice to have the stars (and hot Jupiters) be on the brighter side.

Very true

Added after 18 minutes 28 seconds:

Good first try !

It would be better with height atmosphere and hot vapour like a halo around...

Sirius_Alpha wrote:But what's interesting about the dayside is that, due to the planet's proximity to the star, it is more than half the actual surface of the planet.

In the Discord server, somebody was able to derive a formula to calculate the percentage of the planet's surface that's illuminated by the star:


where R is the star's radius, r is the planet's radius, and d is the distance between the star's center and the planet's center.

Here is my first try (v1.0) to build a hot jupiter around a dwarf.


You can see :
1 - the hot and light atmosphere (on the star side)
2 - the excited poles by warming
3 - the gasous sphere lost by the planet...


Behind the hot jupiter...

A closer view of this hot jupiter.