Pictures from Celestia

[john71]

Countryside 8k. The lower clouds are not very good, I have to improve them.

Base textures are from here:

https://opengameart.org/content/hitw-terrain-textures

Countryside 8k-1.png

Countryside 8k-2.png

Countryside 8k-3.png

Countryside 8k-4.png

[john71]

Gas giant exoplanet v9:

I tweaked this image:

https://scitechdaily.com/a-hot-jupiters-dark-side-is-revealed-iron-clouds-titanium-rain-and-extreme-winds/

Credit: Mikal Evans

gas giant v9-1.png

gas giant v9-2.png

gas giant v9-3.png

gas giant v9-4.png

gas giant v9-5.png

[DaveBowman2001]

STS-71 (Atlantis)

[DaveBowman2001]

The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies

[trappistplanets]

The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies

what addon are you using for andromeda?

[DaveBowman2001]

This one. It was recovered from the Catalan site

[john71]

Sol 32k (new ESA texture):

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Zooming_into_the_Sun_with_Solar_Orbiter

Sol-2022-1.png

Sol-2022-2.png

Sol-2022-3.png

Sol-2022-4.png

Sol-2022-5.png

[john71]

Fictional Venus clouds 32k (based on snowfall_the_cat's texture):

Venus-2022-1.png

Venus-2022-2.png

Venus-2022-3.png

Venus-2022-4.png

Venus-2022-5.png

[DaveBowman2001]

STS-99 (Endeavour)...during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). This is also Endeavour's final solo spaceflight

[john71]

Andromeda Galaxy (M31) 8k:

Andromeda 2022-1.png

Andromeda 2022-2.png

Andromeda 2022-3.png

[DaveBowman2001]

The fifth and last Hubble Servicing Mission, STS-125 (Atlantis)
Hubble addon by Jestr

[DaveBowman2001]

STS-63 (Discovery)...the Shuttle-Mir program's dress rehearsal mission before STS-71

[john71]

Saturn 32k new texture (NASA Cassini close-up texture added):

Saturn 2022-new-1.png

Saturn 2022-new-2.png

Saturn 2022-new-3.png

Saturn 2022-new-4.png

Saturn 2022-new-5.png

Saturn 2022-new-6.png

Saturn 2022-new-7.png

Added after 26 minutes 20 seconds:
Real Saturn (NASA/Kakitsev, AI enhanced):

Saturn-Nasa.jpg

Added after 7 hours 6 minutes:
Image from a similar position as the NASA photo (crude approximation):

Saturn 2022-new-8.png

[john71]

Saturn with corrected colors and less artifacts:

Saturn 2022-corrected.png

Saturn 2022-corrected-2.png

[john71]

I think this is the best Saturn texture I can create:

Saturn 2022 hiper-1.png

Saturn 2022 hiper-2.png

Saturn 2022 hiper-3.png

Saturn 2022 hiper-4.png

Saturn 2022 hiper-5.png

[john71]

256k Earth clouds (procedural dds):

256k clouds-1.png

256k clouds-2.png

256k clouds-3.png

256k clouds-4.png

[trappistplanets]

256k Earth clouds (procedural dds):

this looks quite nice

[john71]

this looks quite nice

Thanx. Unfortunately it seems that Celestia should use 3D clouds because the 2D textures look unrealistic even at very high resolutions.

Maybe a 2D->3D conversion inside Celestia can produce 3D clouds from the cloud textures.

Also the surface after 64k is unrealistic, because there should be visible 3D elevation.

128k~1 pixel is 300m, 256k~1 pixel is 150m.

[trappistplanets]

celestia is a program that is ment to run on most PCs, and having 3d generated clouds might be hard for potato PCs to render without crashing everything, same goes for 3d surface elevations......though you could do low poly surface tiles and just tile everything together so when you zoom in you see the elevation (kinda like a 3d version of a VT)....though thats really hard to pull off

[john71]

though you could do low poly surface tiles and just tile everything together

The simple mirroring and "bending" of a few pixels using elevation data would be nice to build some kind of rudimentary 3D environment.

In the case of clouds a very simple 3D representation would be perfect (using VT pixels).