Celestia Forums

Hi all,

my name is Michael. I'm a completely newbie in forums and furthermore i am still refreshing my very untrained knowledge of the english language. I hope you'll be able to understand me anyway.

Here i've created a new kind of texture for the first discovered exoplanet 51Pegasi by M. Mayor and D. Queloz (Observatoire de Gen?ve). As seen by Phoenix, a german television channel =>"Sternstunden", NHK Enterprises, a documentation by Kenichiro Takiguchi and Setsu Mikumo, ~2007.

Of course it is not a realistic view of 51Pegasi/b but i think this kind of texture is maybe more plausible for this hot jupiter. At least as far as we'll get the first real pictures of pegasi-b

pictures:




Let me know what you think and if it is ok to upload the zipfile (4k,2k,1k textures ~ 51mb) to motherlode in a few days.

Greetings Michael

--- edit ---

MiR wrote:Of course it is not a realistic view of 51Pegasi/b but i think this kind of texture is maybe more plausible for this hot jupiter.

It's a nice texture from the looks of it

As far as plausibility, hot Jupiters are expected to have strong equatorial jets. A recent study has even been able to meausre wind speeds on a hot Jupiter at 5,000 - 10,000 km/h.

John,
You're absolutely right. An image map is mostly important for further discussions. My mistake.
As I said; it's a different kind of texture. Not very easy to create.

So here are the example maps



I've also made two cloud layers. Representing the heat.

Thanks for the reply.
Michael

Hungry4info wrote:

MiR wrote:Of course it is not a realistic view of 51Pegasi/b but i think this kind of texture is maybe more plausible for this hot jupiter.

It's a nice texture from the looks of it

As far as plausibility, hot Jupiters are expected to have strong equatorial jets. A recent study has even been able to meausre wind speeds on a hot Jupiter at 5,000 - 10,000 km/h.

Hungry4info,
thanks at first.
I agree. Pegasi-b is always showing the same "face" to its star. And the planet rotates much nearer around Pegasi than Mercury is to our sun! I think in the middle of the planet surface could be a huge eruption area, where highspeed gas-streams are flowing in a star-shaped way to the darker (and "colder") backside of the planet. Where - close to the terminator - giant storms circulate.

But please remember: My texture is only fiction! I hope a little bit scientific, too. Perhabs it's more important under educational aspects as an illustration. The main challenge was the creation of this map.

...wind speeds on a hot Jupiter at 5,000 - 10,000 km/h.

Oh, I thought the wind speed in the atmosphere is much more higher. So I have to reduce the value in the ssc-file.

Thanks
Michael

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john Van Vliet wrote:you might want to remap that image from orthographic to simplecylindrical

MMPS will do that
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~arcus/mmps/
then with gimp
an example using a image from soho


something in this ball park ? maybe
the image needs to be in simplecylindrical
the above needs more "supper flow" bands
you can check it with the gimp tool "filter/distorts/ polar coordinates"
----
or
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be patient it takes time to learn things

John,

thanks for your help. I do not exactly know what you mean. Why should I remap the image? I know my map alone looks quite terrible . But then in Celestia - because Pegasi/b doesn't rotate around itself - everything seems to be very accurate. Not meticulously but accurate. Only the pinch effect at the poles are still making trouble. But that's nothing new.

See pictures below




But it might be an enormous help to find a program which could solve this problem. So I followed the link to Matthew's Map Projection Software and must say... It's very laboriously to handle (for me ) I'm too incapable to work with it. I'm well-versed in HTML, XML, some Javascript and a little bit PHP and Java... But that's all. Software programming for me is an unknown territory. And - unfortunatly - I haven't the time to learn it. the second problem is: I've only Windows XP installed. And I'm happy if it runs stable every sixty seconds .
Whenever I thought about installing Linux; I see there are too many editions available... that's confusing me a bit. But maybe later I 'll take care about it.

On the other hand your observations touch upon a very important point; maybe I should go on working with the polar coordinates. I'm using an older version of Photoshop but the options are similar to gimp.

At long last let me say that I have created the map one or two years ago. It was my very first addon. Never thought to release it. But over the time my addon collection grows and now I thought the time is right to share it with others. My problem is I need more time. (But perhaps there will be - sooner rather than later - a second edition of 51Pegasi/b available. 51Pegasi/b 2.0 ).

Thanks again for helping to make a better and better Celestia

Michael

--- edit ---

Okay John, Im convinced . I will further work on it.

Thanks for your impartial criticism, work and help

Michael

MiR,

There are ways to build command-line programs like MMPS so they can be run under Windows. One is to install Cygwin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ ) and some of its optional software development components, which is what I did. There are others.

Selden,

thanks for the support. But it is to be feared that my sensitve Windows installation would get pretty huffy about this. Too chancy for me. Maybe I'll look now for a suitable Linux edition and install it on an older machine.

Michael

--- edit ---

John,
right. I don't care much about those things. My machine is nearly five years old. (And nothing is older than an old computer.)
A newer notebook I call my own. Vista is installed. Microsoft Vista comes very glamorous and with many colourful features... But nothing works as it should do. Now I'm using this one for advertisement presentations only.
I'm planning to buy a new computer if Microsoft has released at least service pack 2 for Windows7. Untill then I'll google for malware-destroyers.
But I don't think that this could solve my problems with Windows XP.
Thanks again for your advice, though.
Michael

Not finished yet. Have to fix some colour details, night-texture and cloud layers. The base map should be ready.


Hope you like it.

Hi MiR, that planet looks wondrous. Good work!

Hi Massimo,
thanks, this helps to keep me strenghten up
Pegasi/b makes slow progress. Just added some heat-clouds, some colour adjustments and - of course - still fighting against the "pinched" poles
However, i'm still working on it. But currently it's nothing presentable. Perhabs in one or two weeks
Thanks again for interest, encouragement and your ambitious work here, of course
Michael

Hi Michael, if you are interested in GIMP http://www.gimp.org and are in search for graphic aids in making planetary textures, take a look to these plug-ins:
http://registry.gimp.org/search/node/planet expecially at Gas Giants. They are in form of script (script-Fu), easy customizables. For example the gas giant's script could be removed of the part which perform the spherization of the texture, being thought to render a "circular" view of the planet. It's flat texture's builder make it seamlessly, this maybe can help in your "polar pinch fighting".

--- edit ---

Thank you both for the hints,

In the main I have understood the principle of polar coordinates, pinch-effect and such things. It's more a problem of time.

Gimp is installed. Already a week ago. I like this software. But... everything takes its time
(And first of all I had to clean up my system - John, thanks for the hint. - Windows runs more stable now. )

After all - maybe it's of topical interest - a new picture...


I don't wanna work out too much details. Once again; Pegasi/b (i mean: my Pegasi/b ) is only science fiction. With the emphasis of "fiction". More an artistic impression. The real existing planet must be almost as bright as Pegasi itself. On the other hand it is the first discovered planet outside our own solar system. Therefore Pegasi/b should get a special place in space-exploring history.
And that's the reason why i'm working on it. ;-]

Hope you agree.
Michael

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