Size Comparism Of The Moons Of The Gas Planets, Moon Systems of the gas giants compared Options

[Guest_spaceffm_*]

edited out

[dvandorn]

First off, thanks to Phillip for his insightful review of copyrights. Don't hesitate to contribute in any way you can, Phillip -- it's great to have all kinds of people here!

Secondly, what I'd love to see in terms of a comparative size display would be something like World Wind or Google Earth -- something that zooms back to show you real, scaled images of all of the bodies we've photographed with any kind of resolution (as far away as the Kuiper Belt or as small as Itokawa). Allow the user to zoom in until they get a good balance between resolution and display, and let them rotate and manipulate each object.

You could even take Steve Albers' maps and project them onto appropriately shaped wire-frame objects -- and every time new images are received and the maps are updated, you just re-project them and, voila, you have a properly scaled Solar System model that updates itself.

I know, I know -- nice idea, but a lot of work. It's times like this I wish I was a programmer.

-the other Doug

[helvick]

You could even take Steve Albers' maps and project them onto appropriately shaped wire-frame objects -- and every time new images are received and the maps are updated, you just re-project them and, voila, you have a properly scaled Solar System model that updates itself.

You should take a look at Celestia if you haven't already. It allows you to do all of the above and doesn't stop at the solar system.