TITLE: Earthrise
NAME: Mark Wagner
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mark.wagner17@gte.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Rengaw03/
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mwmoon.jpg
ZIPFILE: mwmoon.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray 3.1e

TOOLS USED: 
    "Display" to convert image to JPEG, the GIMP to adjust the color
balance of the image maps

RENDER TIME: 
    132 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    400Mhz AMD K6-II

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

"The vast loneliness of the moon up here is awe-inspiring, and it makes you
realize just what you have back there on Earth.  The Earth from here is a grand
oasis in the big vastness of space" 

-- Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 astronaut

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The basic creation of this image is not very difficult -- the Earth started out
as three layered image maps, the Moon is an image map and a bump map on a
sphere, and the Sun is simply a light source.  Tweaking them to produce the
correct result was much more difficult.  I added a fourth layer to the Earth
texture to simulate the atmospheric scattering, adjusted the color balance of
the cloud image map to produce whiter clouds, and took the counterintuitive
step of setting the assumed_gamma to 1.8 rather than 1.0 to get the land image
map to look good.



Earth image maps are available from 
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/thomasc1/render/planets/earth.htm

in the file earthpng.zip
        
Earth land map and sea map derived from original Earth map by Constantine
Thomas.
Cloudmap provided by James Hastings-Trew.
Cloudmap transparency coding by Kari Kivisalo.
        
Lunar image map and bump map by James Hastings-Trew
Available from http://www.jht.cjb.net/

The background stars are from Chris Colefax's Galaxy Include File

