ajtribick wrote:The rationale behind why I made the textures the way I did was because they are intended to be generic - the planets themselves will likely have a wide range of different appearances thanks to varying rotation rates, orbital eccentricities, and compositional differences.
You made them?? I wouldn't have guessed.
ajtribick wrote:As for your textures, I am somewhat curious as to why you have depicted the class III planet with cloud patterns, when the class III planets are cloudless. Your classes IV and V appear to bear no relation to any of the hot Jupiter atmospheric circulation models which have been published (the slow rotation rates thanks to tidal synchronisation are predicted to yield circulation patterns very different from rapidly rotating planets like Jupiter), nor do they appear to have any relation to the colours predicted from the Sudarsky spectra (the current textures are based on Grant Hutchison's integrations of the Sudarsky et al. spectra to get the overall colours).
The reason for the class III clouds was for texture. Yes I added a cloud texture, but it is very light to invisible. Just looking at a blue dot looked a bit bland, so this was for aesthetic purposes.
As for the classes IV and V, I am aware that I didn't have the right cloud structure. I currently had to work with what I had until I could find (or make) the proper could layer.
ajtribick wrote:A deficiency in both the Celestia default textures and your ones is that observational evidence indicates that hot Jupiters are actually extremely dark, reflecting almost no light. Instead the planets would glow from thermal emission - pL planets transport heat to the darkside as well, whereas the hotter pM class planets do not. As far as I am aware, there is no observational evidence for the increase in albedo in class V planets caused by silicate clouds.
Thank your for your advice. Like I mentioned before, this is a work in progress project of mine. So I have plenty of time to fix my mistakes.