Celestia Forums

I looked if i found this somewhere, but no...
When you look at Saturn, the ring is always as brght as the planet, so if you look from behind the planet (in the direction of the sun) you see a DARK ring, although if you look at it (fom the same Side) you see a BRIGHT ring, with a correct eclipse shadow from the planet.
System: GeForce2 MX, Athlon 1000, recent driver

just to mention it...

Same here with a GeForce 3 64MB, driver version 28.32.

You know I think Chris did this on purpose...

I believe naturally when you are on the opposing side of the planet...viewing it towards the sun...since rings are made up of minute asteroid particles, they would be shadowed much like the darkside of a planet..and that is the effect you see...

I think...

Good point :)

*Remembers to turns brain on for future discussions*

Bjorn Jonsson (who, I believe, painted the Saturn ring texture used in Celestia) talks about realistically rendering the illuminated and shadowed sides of the rings on his Web site:

http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/satsys_rend.html
http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/data/saturn/rings.html

The really dense rings tend to be dark on the shadowed side, but the sparser ones are still bright. (This makes some sense if you think of the rings as composed of little particles: if you're on the night side of one of these particles you might still be able to see part of the illuminated portion. But if there are enough of them that they shadow each other, then the whole thing is going to look dark.)