Some views of colorful Nick Risinger/Fridger Milk-Way add-on. Blurrish-blobbish MW regions are good for galaxylight-gain up to 60%. Original MW map and NickRisinger/Fridger map have been scaled up to 8k before processing. Lots of true, specific net images of HII regions and famous nebulae have been overlayed with various blending parameters. To avoid distortion concerning the spherical mapping, the large objects have been split in small pieces. Stars on the images were the final guides. For small pieces just a smallest rotation was enough.

huge Gum nebula + Vela SN remnant


Cygnus region with overlayed North America-Pelican, few Schedir filaments and Cygnus Loop (Veil nebula).


Scorpius and Zeta Oph. region


Orion, Rosette, Cone and Seagull nebulae


From Ara to S. Cauda (jpg image)


Scaled disk stars is the option in which it looks best.

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Never at rest.
Massimo

The last shot would have been this:

The Cepheus region


P.S.
Three login to post this topic. Also with the "automatic login" checked in. Does someone else find this "login" issue?

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Finally, for completeness, without posting new screendumps, there are also Carina-Lambda Cen.-Hearth&Soul-Monkeyhead-Flaming-California and Jellyfish-Simeis SN remnants. The fundamental colors of MW layers within GIMP were RYB, and the tuning of the final PNG is made through CMOD parameters: "diffuse" for the overall/specific color opacity (black diffuse color makes all transparent of course) and "emissive" for the enhancement/dimming of overall/specific color. This blend alot for color schemes. In the screenshots above the color settings are:

diffuse 0.6 0.55 0.65
emissive 0.8 0.7 0.9
opacity 1

A "knobbed" monitor's palette can change the view in which they are seen.

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Great project, fenerit!

a map of all extended (H_alpha) nebulosities in our MW region should be included in celestia.Sci. Inspired by your beautiful displays, I am thinking how to do this best and also which method would be most "service friendly". I do have the famous Orion loop already in as you have noticed: Here are two shots, the second being a zoom view of the Orion belt region.

[click on image by all means!]

[click first on image, then hit the fullscreen key of your browser(F11 in FF)]


The nice thing is that celestia.Sci has an optional mechanism already built in that offers a smoothly increasing/decreasing color-enhancement of galaxies, nebulae and globulars, following the increase/decrease of a suitable brightness variable! This approach of mine nicely models the fact that under weak light conditions the eye can only distinguish shades of gray, while after amplification of the light, colors can be seen as well. The effect looks very appealing/realistic. I might display a short video to illustrate the animation feature, if the observer approaches e.g. a galaxy with high speed

Fridger

PS: Sorry to read about your Login problems...Nothing has changed from the admin side.

EDIT:
Here is the announced video with the observer racing towards the M 100 spiral galaxy. The video illustrates the increasing amount of coloration of the galaxy with
decreasing distance (i.e. increasing apparent brightness).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
M 100 color increase
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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I took a look at your video; indeed the galaxy rendering is several order of magnitudes far better than the current one. H_alpha regions for other galaxies seem truly realistic as they are in the video. For H regions of the MW indeed needs a specific approach for itself; also for LMC imho, due to the Tarantula which is a "must have" for space trips around. Either you do activate some sort of particles system or think to 3D point cloud sprites modelling with very small pointsizes for performance gain. Albeit unknown the depth shape of the regions, their constraints "would" be the cross-section diameter of the spiral arms; to say: blobs from where they are now in distance to the border of its spirals. Finally, to remain upon the graphic point, I think that the Cham's nebulae method is good to imitate some features like the Orion's loop and more fainty region like the Zeta oph. I remember some filamentuos nebulae good also to resemble Cygnous zone. These imitative parts, more suited to look as they indeed are, could be inserted into the forementioned galaxy approach. The cons is that point cloud modelling is not easy to do like the polygonal one. To Cham must be tell him to model point cloud spirals and see whether my discourse makes sense.

P.S.
There is a way to substitute the scaled disk stars with a scaled blob stars? Or at least to not scaled disk the Sun (ugly) and planets when that option is active?

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Just another point. As far as I know you was rendering MW galaxy by "spriteizing" the spiral white dots upon image. Could a group, stack of images be rendered in the same way just to enhance the "depth" of the MW edge-on view? In same fashion some stack levels could be the H_alpha regions.

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Right, I am not talking about the far-away H_alpha regions (star forming regions) that are numerous but look quite compact from here. I am wondering about rendering these extended H_alpha regions in the neighborhood of the MW. Sure sprites are a possibility, yet for celestia.Sci there are a number of considerations that should not be ignored.

So I need some further thinking.

In .Sci the stars are kind of fancy (inclusive colors) and rendered exclusively by fast shaders. Unfortunately, there is still a small bug in my Intel HD 3000 driver. With a NVIDIA card they look literally perfect.

Fridger

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The rendering of .Sci galaxies has gone through quite a number of iterations, notably also improved by the graphical art of Christophe (aka ElChristou). But yes, 3d volume rendering in OGL can be done via stacks of 2d textures. However, I am afraid that we would loose in terms of speed...In .Sci I also use stacks of textures serving various purposes (dusty background layers etc). But their number is strictly limited.

Fridger

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Fantastic the rendering of the approaching galaxy! Let me know if you want that I try it.

No login problems on this side of the Equator.

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Guillermo Abramson
Bariloche, Argentina

Hi Guillermo, hi again Massimo,

here is another short video this time the blue spiral M 101. I think the increasing coloration with closer distance is far better visible, here.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Blue M 101 color increase
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What I do here in more technical terms, is to re-express RGB in terms of Saturation(S), Hue(H) and Value(V), and increase S with the brightness V up to a maximum that may be set with a slider. Since S=0 <=> grayscale image, the increase of S with Hue=const does not falsify the coloration.

Here is the setting panel that may be accessed with a click both from windowed and fullscreen displays...

[first click on image then hit your browser's fullscreen key (F11 in FF)]


Cheers to the other side of the Equator,
F.

PS: I should add that I recently coded the preferences dialog in very flexible form: it is now modeless and implemented into a QDockWidget.

The former implies that one may bring up the preferences dialog any time with a click and try out the settings in the main window without interruption. The QDockWidget feature remembers the dialog's last position and allows it to be floating, docked ... All key-shortcuts and commands work in fullscreen like in windowed mode. The toolbar with the toolbuttons at the bottom and the menubar at the top of the main window appear on demand via mouse events.

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Beautiful.

Your friends Carena and Wagner were here last week.

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Guillermo Abramson
Bariloche, Argentina

Great. Last time we met , Marcela, Carlos and myself had a nice dinner together in Hamburg...Amazing how small the world has become. My wife and I are still sorry that we were unable to follow an invitation to Bariloche a long time ago when we spent four months in Brasil.

F.

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Continuing...
Two shots of further assessment. A copy of the MW layer has been overlayed with the waterpaint artistic filter applied upon. This filter, applied after the black background removal, makes the fading colors between regions to look more "cloudy" and its overimposition with tuned opacity upon the basic MW layer gets fake bumps. Zeta Scorpii area is furtermore overlayed of a widefield amateur astronomer photo faded out at borders and blended in. In this new assessment the CMOD setting is:
diffuse 1 0.87 1
emissive 1 1 1
opacity 0.6

and such a kind of opacity is good for grids display purposes.
(jpg )



To test how the colors could looks throughtfully, I have used the freeware program Flux to change the monitor temperature within a range of 1.2k-6.5k Kelvin, and the greenish band in-between the beginning of the galaxy's halo is present just at high monitor temperatures - and with such a diffuse value of lesser than 1 - in very fainty fashion. This tuning can be seen in the Coal Sack - Carina area of the screenshot 2.


P.S
Amateur sstronomers images are the better ones to do this stuff, but it is unclear how the credits must be given or whether there are prohibitions at all as well. These are public dominion images easy to find by googling; however albeit copyrighted (some have the signature upon), while in some of their site is said to give credits by quoting, in others there is neither references to the service rules nor prohibitions.

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo

Getting even better, Massimo!
Fridger

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Thanks. A way to spend rainy nights before to fall asleep. I wonder about people with artistic studies and graphic skills: at these resolutions they coud do some areas by hand. My drawing knowledge from school's studies is in mechanics and machinery, here there is not a single pixel made by my hand. My use of the pen tablet is limited to the eraser and smudge tools.

_________________
Never at rest.
Massimo