I wasn't sure if there was a space art thread, so the next best thing was to start a new one.

Here are some of my own efforts....

Titan, near the Huygens landing site.
When they first released the descent images, the first thing that came to mind were the canyon washes that drained into the floor of Death Valley. Here is a personal photo of Mosaic Canyon, which has wonderfully lithified breccias in its walls. I can imagine that Titan's 'bedrock' would be similar in some cases. To the casual observer, Mosaic had no trace of vegetation (I highly recommend Death Valley for those who want to see natural processes completely unencumbered by biology, particularly on the alluvial fans near Badwater Basin).

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Titan, on the surface of a polar lake.
It is summertime, but it isn't quite like a lazy afternoon in the Adirondacks....

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Above Titan.
Here, I took an image of Neptune, added rings and a moon, and then superimposed a Cassini Titan image. (I learned the hard way that it isn't always smart to save images in jpeg ).

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Above Titan.
Same concept, with variations.

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Above Titan.
Here, two moons are eclipsing Saturn, one of which is Titan (Yeah, I used a Hubble image of Saturn).

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Saturn air.
I 'sampled' the atmosphere and cloudtops from a Cassini image, blew them up, and stretched them out to simulate the view from a hypothetical aircraft. I then drew in the rings and added a Cassini image of Titan.

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Saturn air.
Earlier version.

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Io, near a caldera.
Here, three volcanoes erupt simultaneously. Again, Jupiter was snatched from a Cassini image.

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Enceladus polar summer.
Saturn image from Cassini. Sun from Photoshop lens flare effect. Everything else from me.

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Enceladus polar winter.
Same scene, more or less.

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Uranus at equinox.
I was disappointed that Voyager 2 was unable to capture the beautifully detailed planet at close range, so I did the next best thing. I did start with a Voyager 2 image, which made an ideal canvas.

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Does anyone else here have their own space art?

WOW Gladstoner, they're gorgeous!!! As a lifelong space art fan and collector I am very impressed. Love those Enceladus pictures, very evocative. Do you have an online gallery?

Thanks.

I've dumped them off on my Flickr account at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/55654631@N00/...57604004684875/

These are the entirety of my efforts so far....

Interesting: http://dreamsofspace.nfshost.com/spaceart.htm

I remember a lot (though certainly not all, or even most) of that art from the children's space books I used to read when I was young -- I wish I still had some of those books! Libraries have long since discarded them as "out of date", and used book stores rarely carry them.

Chesley Bonestell was of course the best space artist from the period, but I am also partial to the work of Jack Coggins -- which, if not so technically proficient, had a wonderful way of capturing the darkness and loneliness of distant regions of space.

Ludek Pesek did quite a bit of georgeous geologically more realistic space art for National Geographic in the late 60's, early 70's. There's at least one book of his space-art. He also wrote an early (first or second) manned-mission-to-Mars novel, I think the title was "The Earth is Near", with the obligatory problems and crew struggle to survive plotline. It was nothing spectacular, but it was well done and carefully thought out.

http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

Someone has been reading their KSR by the look of things. Nice graphic for a april fools.

Enough with the Solar System..... I'm in the mood for some extrasolar planets.

Here are some 'hot Jupiters'....

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Transit across a familiar-looking G star.

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Dazzling days; incandescent nights.

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Nothing to see but silicate clouds and rayleigh scattering.

Some more extrasolar planets....

Gliese 581 system:

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Gliese 581 b, a 'hot Neptune':

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Gliese 581 c, interpreted here as a terrestrial planet with a supercritical ocean:

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Gliese 581 d, interpreted here as an 'ocean planet':

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Here's my artistic impression of the view from 150 km above the T16 canyon of Titan on an exceptionally haze-free day:

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Full resolution here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/4367364580/

I used the same techinque as Gladstoner used in the first image of this thread, I combined multiple terrestrial photographs from my own collection then played with them heavily.

-Mike

Mike, you did an amazing work!
Are the detailed surface features rendered with some CG software or based on reaal pictures from another similar place?

Thanks!

They are real pictures taken during some airplane trips over the last few years. The foreground canyon is Deer Canyon, Colorado, the mid background is a windfarm over Utah, and the sunset cloud image was over the flying over the Appalachians of North Carolina (always good for a hazy image - the cloud images were barely contrast enhanced.)

Would the sky really be blue? I was under the impression that quite a bit of oxygen is needed for that color, at least near the surface. Still looks cool though!

Yes it would - google for some Huygens descent imagery and spectroscopy, it's been quite well establshed.

Of course, the blue haze layer, I forgot about it! Never mind!

At that altitude, yes. I used the upper left panel of PIA08112 as a guide. Specifically, the lower right corner of that panel since it was the most sunward direction.

i like this one of Io
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it is one of my desktop backgrounds

or this new raw image from Cassini
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for some odd reason i keep hearing this "space opera " theme
"the imperial march "

Deimos

Trying to capture winter at troy.

First my model MER on the floor, flashlight on bed. Then adding the
Calypso panorama and fiddling around in photoshop elements.

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Beautiful! I like the spotlight effect when it is just on the floor!

Thanks. Actually it's on a tilted piece of cardboard on the floor. That shot is more dramatic, but less realistic.

Here are some other shots plus an intermediate photoshop version.
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Pluto by Ron Miller;
http://www.black-cat-studios.com/catalog/pluto.html

Not as red as depicted on most of the NASA artist's impressions

Pluto was brought up so
Pluto rise and Charon rise
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Pluto based on the map by:Marc Buie
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~buie/pluto/maptoys.html