Dirk's Space Art Page

Ray Traced Space Art

These images were created using the Persistence of Vision raytracer for OS/2, and some tools created by John Beale,Heiko Eissfeldt, and Chris Colefax.

Hitchhiking on an Asteroid - What it might look like to hitchhike on an asteroid in a belt of asteroids much denser than that of our own solar system.[GIF]

Close Approach - An asteroid makes a close approach to an Earth-like planet.[GIF]

Moonrise - A small moon rises over an alien shore.[GIF]

The Rings - A ringed planet rises over an icy mountain range on a nearby moon.[GIF]

Red Giant Through the Clouds - Looking up at a red giant through the clouds of a nearby planet.[GIF]

Ring Plane - A view of a planet with a methane-rich atmosphere from within a ring of particles recently created by the tidal disruption of a moon.[GIF]

Fog - A Jupiter-like planet rises through the foggy sky of a nearby moon.[GIF]

Birth and Death - A massive star undergoes a supernova explosion, while star formation continues in nearby nebulae. [GIF]

Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impact - Watching the pieces of SL-9 as they slam into the atmosphere of Jupiter. [GIF]

Hand Painted Space Art

These images were painted by hand using various PC paint programs. The backgrounds for these images are actual star fields as seen from Earth and were created from the Bright Star Catalog with some programs I wrote in REXX (search the BSC and create a list of stars for a given part of the sky), FORTRAN (create the image from the list of stars), and C++ (write out a Targa image file).

Binary Overlooking Orion and Taurus - A binary consisting of a O-type main sequence star and an M-type giant with Orion and Taurus carrying out their eternal struggle in the background.[GIF]

Binary in Leo - A binary containing a spotted G-type star and a B-type star orbit each other under the watchful eye of the Lion.[GIF]

X-ray Binary in Sagittarius - The wind of a G-type star is trapped by the gravity of a neutron star and forms an accretion disk with jets erupting out of the disk plane.[GIF]

Mass Transfer - A stream of material flows from a G-type giant towards a B-type main sequence star in the early stages of the formation of a disk.[GIF]

Eclipse - A G-type star eclipses its nearby B-type companion, with the other member of the triple system off in the distance.[GIF]

Combination

These images combine ray tracing and hand painting:

Total Eclipse - A total eclipse of a star by a moon as seen from a second moon.[GIF]

Red Giant Rising - A red giant star rises over the mountainous terrain of a long-dead planet. [GIF]