Celestia mobile 1.9.18 for Android devices has been released. This update fully releases the new PSF star renderer, which can be enabled by going to Settings > Renderer > Star Style! Download from GitHub

Teamwork in action! Limb darkening was primarily implemented by Hleb Valoshka, @astrochara.bsky.social calibrated the star textures, while Pedro J. Garcia and I helped in fixing. The animation also shows seamless transition to the resolved star rendering mode, which was developed by Levin Li and me.

What would the night sky look like if we could see it in radio waves? This synthetic false color map, which was created as a byproduct of my work with radio data, illustrates this hypothetical scenario. Simple cylindrical projection, center right ascension 0° (increases to the left).

Details about the rendering method and examples of its implementation in Python are available here: github.com/Askaniy/Cele... Last month, I revised the formulas to make them much closer to the original PSF. Thanks to Levin Li for implementing the method in Celestia!

If you see this, post your blue art ☄️

Crescent Mercury #mercury #solarsystem #space #astronomy

Last week, I processed a global contrast-enhanced false color map of asteroid Ryugu by painting a mask to fill regions of unknown or corrupted data. The RGB values correspond to Hayabusa2's x, v, b filters. Original map: jlpeda.jaxa.jp/en/product/a... Yokota et al. (2021): doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/...

(1/3) Another set of Jupiter test renders from the Voyager 2 map I'm working on. Here I used True Color Tools (TCT) to correct the color. This is a great set of tools by @askaniy.bsky.social to compute realistic colors (see github.com/Askaniy/True... )

Uranus during equinox #space #astronomy #solarsystem #uranus #hubble

Saturn #astronomy #space #solarsystem #planets #saturn #hubble

Map of Mars in true colors: images from Mars Express were projected by Michael et al. (2024) and post-processed with TrueColorTools. TCT used the Tikhonov regularization to reconstruct a spectral cube from four High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) channels and simulated human perception of it. [1/3]

Recently updated Cylindrical Texture Calibrator, a Python utility with a GUI that was developed to help the @celestiaproject.bsky.social community with ongoing updates (we need more devs, by the way!). I've included some interesting details in the thread. [1/5]

I present three maps of Titan: one in visible "true" colors (albedo scaled and gamma corrected), one in enhanced colors (linear albedo scale with a factor of five), and one of the lakes. In this thread, I will briefly describe how the impenetrable haze was bypassed.

Ganymede in 1979 from Voyager 2 (mosaic) true color, processed from the raw data using @askaniy.bsky.social's TrueColorTools I used 9 OGBV frames for this processing. the edge of the disk is slightly cut off, so a small rendered view was inserted and spliced in. manual processing took ~3.5 hours 🧪🔭

Now published in AJ! Get in here this system is crazy iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Giant planets orbiting red dwarfs are uncommon, as are hot Neptunes ("Neptunian desert"), as are exoplanets in polar orbits. On this painting, the host star "observes" its strange planet through a massive polar dark spot. [1/9] of the "art research" thread on TOI-3884 and "red" dwarfs in general.

Reflectance colors of 3I/ATLAS in sRGB color space with illuminant E (assuming 0.5 albedo, it's very likely lower)

Voyager 1, WAC. March 4, 1979. Photos in violet, blue, and orange filters were aligned, reconstructed into a spectral cube, and convolved in sRGB color space with Illuminant E. There are gamma-corrected and contrast-enhanced options. Done with my program github.com/Askaniy/TrueColorTools

Artistic representation of Epsilon Eridani b, also known as AEgir [sic]

Emsenhuber et al. 2024 (DOI 10.3847/PSJ/ad2178) obtained a population of collision outcomes (2 bodies with m<10⁻² M⊕) that form a contact binary. Structure is maintained by material strength and spin. The painted peanut is Pluto-sized in length, but the size of Mars is theoretically achievable.

An attempt to (relatively) realistically paint a hot Jupiter with a quasi-closed type of atmosphere, according to Bisikalo et al. 2021. (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021PhyU...)

I'm developing an open source program with GUI that stores a variety of space photometry and converts them to color, TrueColorTools. It can also process images and generate color charts. Here's the latest table of some featured objects (geometric albedo mode, sRGB color space, Illuminant E)

A quick painting of a superoceanic mini-Neptune planet. Originally posted on my Tumblr on 24 Feb 2024. #astroart #spaceart #sciart Made for Askiniy's TrueColorTools logo with permission: github.com/Askaniy/True... Total time spent: 2 hours www.tumblr.com/arbodox/7432...