Saturn Rings

[cacjardy]

Hi,

I found this image, and was wondering if anything like that has been made for Celestia.

I've attached the picture, it is a Saturn eclipse, but I like the ring details.

Cak

[t00fri]

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I used the new Ciclops imaging of the rings and did this
(http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... s&start=19)

Detail view of the rings from that shot (Ciclops)


Next the new rings in Celestia:
(Click for a large image!)

(Click for a large image!)


Good rings are not easy. One has to also implement earthbound measurements about the ring transparency in the rings' alpha channel. The albedo as imaged via spacecraft photos is just half the story! To measure the transparency one uses a star of known luminosity which happens to pass across the rings. There are nice scientific data on this which are implemented of course in my above results.

But since there are still some issues lacking, I have never published these new rings e.g. as part of the official Celestia distribution...

Fridger

[John Van Vliet]

--- edit ---

[volcanopele]

Great to see an unlit-side rings texture coming around!

[chris]

I've actually been working on improving the rendering of Saturn's rings from the unlit side. I'm not using a separate texture here. Rather the pixel shader just makes a different calculation when the viewer is on the opposite side of the rings than the light source. The technique will benefit from any improvements in the ring texture. The images below use the default texture from 1.6.0.

Here are the rings from the unlit side:

saturn-unlit-2.png

For comparison, here's a similar view of Saturn from the lit side:

saturn-lit-2.png

I'll be posting more on this soon in the Developer Talk forum.

--Chris