i just wanted to see what the planets looked like relative to each other in size.
i tried to to this in a space setting with a starfield, but i couldn’t get enough light into it
without whiting out the planets.
any thoughts?
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I like the idea. I have been thinking about doing something similar but I was going to put them on visible ‘tracks’ and try to animate them.
Trying to show both the size and distance is difficult as the smaller planets almost disappear. Also by trying to fit them all on the one image means the planets look quiet small rather than the huge things they are.
There is a cool series of pictures floating around the internet (which despite some searching I can’t seem to find) which basically puts sets of planets next to each other (Inner Planets then Outer (with some inner for scale and so on) so you can see how massive Jupiter is when Earth is next to it and then another that shows how the sun totally dwarfs everything else (they also go on to show how our sun is then dwarfed by other suns, it all makes you feel quiet small!).
If you wanted a starfield you could render just the star field then fade it out as it gets to the middle of the image then paste your planets over the top. That way you’d get the star field at the top and your planets at the bottom. The advantage of this would be your smaller planets would not disappear in to the starfield (or at least I imagine this would look cool).
where’s pluto? ohhh right
cool thanks for this - helps illustrate how delicate the earth really is
something similar.
Wow! I love reading about the universe and stuff like this… It really puts things in to perspective that you cant quite comprehend xD -
From MAROONED by John W. Campbell (1976)
You have seen a scale map of our system. You know the dimensions. Forty, seventy, one hundred and one hundred - forty millions of miles are the orbits of the Minor Planets. Then - the Great Gulf. It's five hundred million to Jupiter, nine hundred million to Saturn, a billion and three quarters to Uranus. When the Lord made this system, he used two scales. Maybe he started out with one, and didn't like the looks of the dinky little system he got - planets with diameters measured in thousands of miles, orbits with diameters measured in millions. Maybe he threw that scale away, and decided to start all over with something worth while. The dust specks he had, he just forgot, and worked with a scale reading in billions instead of millions for the orbits, and he used tens of thousands of miles for planet diameters.
At any rate, there are two systems really, the Inner System, and the Outer System, and they're as different as two entirely strange systems might be. Four, seven, ten and fourteen tens of millions for the Inner System. Four, eight, seventeen, twenty - eight hundreds of millions for the Outer System.rusmannx: Those pictures are the ones I was thinking of and were the images that made me want to do a scale model type image. Part of the reason I was thinking of doing an animation was that you could do a fly by where the camera was the same distance from each planet as it passed, I was hoping that I could somehow work it so that the flying camera would be able to give the impression of the relative distance between the planets and the fixed distance would give a sense of scale. I got stuck on the bit where you would need something sort of flying by in the background to give a sense of speed (and thus the immense distance travelled) rather then the rather bleak emptiness of space.
JeffK: If you haven’t already you might want to read “A Short History of Almost Everything” by Bill Bryson. It is kind of an intro to the history of a few science disciplines for dummies, I really enjoyed it :). The first part of the book is about the universe we live in and he does in words what the above images do in pictures.
Yes well right. I’m as far as you are in building the planets. It is a long way to build a more or less reasonbly accurate solar system, though.
I know because, we have the a similar idea, I believe.
How are you planning to make the rings of Saturn and Jupiter ?