Celestia Forums

One of the photographs taken by the New Horizons spacecraft is of Io setting past the limb of Jupiter.

Jupiter's night side is dark, but Io is brightly lit by sunlight reflected from Jupiter's bright side.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000978/

It'd be really nice if Celestia could show this someday...

Wow. That's really an impressive view.

selden wrote:One of the photographs taken by the New Horizons spacecraft is of Io setting past the limb of Jupiter.

Jupiter's night side is dark, but Io is brightly lit by sunlight reflected from Jupiter's bright side.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000978/

It'd be really nice if Celestia could show this someday...

Here's another stunning view from New Horizons.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Two_M ... r_999.html

- Hank

Both sites say the shots were intended to be artistic in nature?

Great use of taxpayer money.

(no, i'm not bashing the images, I love them too!)

I've gotten Celestia to do that before. If you place a tiny star within Jupiter, you'll get faint light to shine on the moons. It's a little glitchy and not perfect though. If not careful, you can get Jupiter's night side lit up, and odd effects like that. I abandoned the effort after not being able to get the orbit of the star around the Sol barycentre aligned with Jupiter's orbit.

The one I did was a brown dwarf around another star, I put a dim L dwarf within a planet, and it acted as if the planet was shining light onto objects around it (The planet's orbit wasn't defined as a custom orbit, and it wasn't orbiting a barycentre, so it was significantly easier). But these effects can be done in Celestia.