Scientific Exoplanet Renderer

This might be what I've been waiting for...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/scientific-exoplanet-renderer/


-M-

Ignore the comments, tho.

-M-

Looking at some of the pictures, I'm not really convinced. Some of them look rather... cartoonish.

Perhaps a little overdone, (I'm not crazy about the ice planet) but I like the concept behind it.

Seems slightly more realistic than say, LunarCell. I'm just looking for a REALLY good generator...

or maybe I have no taste.

-M-

I am really sceptical about the strong orange tint of the M dwarf planet renders. Bear in mind that the star illuminating them is comparable in temperature to a filament lightbulb, and that the brain does enough "white balancing" to deal with that to make it look light white light.

Where i can download this software?

Like most movies...coming in Summer 2012. It was originally scheduled for a spring release, but they wanted to tweak it some more, I guess.

http://phl.upr.edu/projects/ser

For a little more about it, go here. It was designed mainly for rendering terrestrials, not gaseous planets. That might explain the cartoony look of some of them. (or it could also be just weaknesses/ limitations of the program when it renders certain things like ice or lava flows.)

-M-

Lazarus wrote:

I am really sceptical about the strong orange tint of the M dwarf planet renders. Bear in mind that the star illuminating them is comparable in temperature to a filament lightbulb, and that the brain does enough "white balancing" to deal with that to make it look light white light.

Meaning the star itself would look white to the human eye (even though looking at it is obviously dangerous, lol), or the starlight reflecting off the planet would look white, or both?

The star would look white to the human eye.

Now to hijack my own thread...but wouldn't the fact that an M star's peak radiation is in the redder end of the spectrum mean it would look reddish?

Wouldn't Wien's Law support such an idea? OR are star colors apparent only at a distance?

-M-

I believe it has to do with how the human eye's cone cells work. At the distance of a habitable planet from an M dwarf, the apparent brightness of the star is so high that it would saturate the human eye into being unable to perceive the difference in colour.

Plus your brain is very good at normalising the light so it does not appear tinted.

Consider that you can see things in daylight (~5800 K light source) and in a room lit by a filament lightbulb (~3000 K) and see both as being "white light".

How does the light color or apparent object color change once you get into the brown dwarf ranges?

The "brightest" brown dwarf that I could find in Celestia, Epsilon Indi Ba, has a temperature of about 1,350 K. What would that look like, and what might the cooler temperatures look like?

I found a Wiki article, which is on thermal radiation, and it has a table that shows you what an object looks like at a certain temperature. I figured it might apply to stars too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation

The table is about a third of the way down.

The temps are in Celsius, but I found a converter that converted the table to kelvin:

Quote :

480 c = 753.15 k = faint red glow
580 c = 853.15 k = dark red
730 c = 1003.15 k = bright red, slightly orange
930 c = 1203.15 k = bright orange
1100 c = 1373.15 k = pale yellowish orange
1300 c = 1573.15 k = yellowish white
> 1400 c = 1673.15 k = white (yellowish if seen from a distance through atmosphere)

Think this may be reasonably accurate? Granted, this may apply to brown dwarves more, since actual hydrogen-fusing stars are 2000 k and higher.