Astro Art of the Week #6

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Here’s another installment for our new feature, Astro Art of the Week, where we feature our readers’ artwork they have created via digital editing software and other media. On a warm summer day, this image of “Frozen Nitrogen Landscape” looks almost inviting! This image was created by UT reader “Bunnyman,” a.k.a. Stephen Guida. What was the inspiration for this image? “A couple of years ago I was reading about Pluto and its eccentric orbit,” Stephen told us, “how its atmosphere is gaseous part of the time and freezes out into solid material as it reaches its aphelion. I started to imagine a large rocky planet, many times the size of Earth, with a highly eccentric orbit and a dense nitrogen atmosphere which would freeze out into a solid at different points in its orbit. The frozen nitrogen “lake” covers most of the planet’s surface and the background mountain ranges, covered with nitrogen “snow”, poke through and tower thousands of meters above.”

Stephen said this image is a composite of images produced with three separate software tools. The frozen lake and background mountains were produced with a image-generation tool called Terragen. The stars and moon in the black sky were produced with POV-Ray, and the bright blue star was produced with Solar Cell. Check out Bunnyman’s website for more images he has created.

Thanks for sharing your photo-editing wizardry Stephen! Readers, if you’ve got a space or astronomy image you’ve created and would like to share it, submit it to Nancy . And we still haven’t found nirvana yet for what to call this new feature — so if you have any suggestions, post your idea in the comments.