Help - primitive earth texture?

[Guest]

Hi. I am a high school teacher who is using Celestia to my great pleasure to teach classes of quite enthused High School kids. They are in love with this wonderful program. I set up dozens of visual configurations in Celestia and use them in class to show my students what things look like from space.

One of my dreams with Celestia would be to use it to create the Earth and moon as they were billions of years ago, when the moon was only 20,000 miles or so from a rapidly spinning earth and loomed very large in the sky. Of course, things would have been very different then on both places. Earth continents would be unlike their shapes now (frankly, any shape but the present ones would probably do fine). The atmosphere would be without oxygen to color it blue, and would have a reddish/yellow tint. The oceans would be present in different spots between different land masses. Glaciers and polar ice might be quite different. Volcanoes would be extensive, with thousands of active eruptions all over the planet stimulated by both earth's young and extensive internal heat and the moon's enormous gravitational tug.

The moon also would be different. It would have fewer craters and it's Mare might even be volcanically flowing lava flows. Floating in space 15 times closer to earth, it would be a most incredible sight.

I would like to create this early earth and moon, and place them in orbit around one of Celestia's many stars (they won't mind) as a convenient means of visiting them whenever I need to.

My problem is, I don't have any software to create or model planets or moons. and I don't have the knowledge in advance to learn it quickly. I own Paintshop Pro 7.0 as a photo editing program, but I don't think it can do this. Likewise, I don't own Photoshop or Gimp and cannot afford to buy them.

With all of the great user-designed solar systems out there, do any of you know of a planet texture available for download that would resemble the volcanic, ocean and icecap covered early Earth? Magellen's radar Venus texture might be a possible starting point, but I'd need to add oceans and icecaps. I don't know how. Likewise, is there a color model of a cratered moon that might also include glowing lava fields, that I could use for a reasonable model of our primitive moon? If so, please tell me the website addresses.

I really appreciate your help. Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,

Frank Gregorio

[billybob884]

well, making these textures isnt going to be easy, considering we wern't exactally around to know what it looked like

[fsgregs]

Hi BillyBob. Thanks for the post to an earlier e-mail of mine. However, Rassilon tackled the problem and came up with a great texture. See my other post on the topic.

Regards,

Frank

[billybob884]

guess i was a little late with that one