To begin with I collected a set of textures of these objects from many different sources (mainly the Internet). However, all objects were created and rendered using my Amiga computer! At first I created a scene with the whole Solar System - scale 1:1 (surprisingly LightWave 3D does allow the necessary distance range!) but it soon proved to be difficult to "navigate" in a vast region of many thousands Gm (or a few billion kilometers). Therefore I decided to shrink all objects and distances by the factor of a billion! All in all it did show me how large the Solar System really is!!!
    When creating the objects for planets and their moons I did take into account the oblatness of gas giants and the irregular shapes of some of the moons. 
    Some of the moons sport craters that are enormous compared to their size e.g. Mars' Phobos or Saturn's Mimas. I created their rough representations on the objects alone using the DRILL and BOOLERAN features in Modeler. The realism was further deepened using appropriate textures and bump-mapping. Shown below is the preview of a scene with Saturn and Mimas.

If you click the button below the figure it will SHOW/HIDE the rendered frame!

    While creating the scenes I was mainly using the PARENT feature which allowed me to "attach" the camera the particular moon. It was necessary to create a separate scene for each moon and a separate one for the transit of a freehand camera from one object to another.

The motion of the camera "attached" to Phobos...
 Please note the "dot" below the word ''Modeler''.
This dot is actually... Deimos!

    
    By the way let me explain the strange bahaviour of the moons themselves. Namely, practically all the moons shown in the animations have their rotational periods synchronised with their orbital periods (like our Moon!) and this is what makes them look so "fixed".
    To make all objects always fit in the "frame" I hade to make the field of view wide enough 83°×67° (ZOOM FACTOR 1.5 – which corresponds to the focal length of 11.2 mm). A side effect of using such a wide field of view was a slight distorsion on the edges of the sky texture.
    By the way this particular texture was made using a not so widely known astronomical software called Voyager (Amiga version). Although it is quite an oldie it still has a lot of power for it includes such important features as entering new cometary orbital parameters! 

The sky texture used in my animations...
(I supplemented it with the outline of the Milky Way
as well as the Magellanic Clouds and M31)
It is public domain.
The image flipped horizontally due to the specific process
 of on the outside of laying it on the 3D object representing the sky.

 
    Please note that always when the Sun comes into view the sky texture is "dimmed". I made it using a simple trick with adjusting transparency (OBJECT DISSOLVE) and the ENVELOPE feature.

    For rendering frames I used the RAYTRACE SHADOWS feature which made generating each frame more time-consuming but allowed me for instance to include a shadow transiting Jupiter in an animation showing its moons (and not only once!). 

Left: a sample frame from the animations showing the "shadow" of the moon.
Right: a shadow transiting Jupiter in an actual photo...

    I no longer recall how long did it take to render everything... I am sure though it was a very long time for it took me many months to complete all the animations! (they were finished in Spring 2001 – it was not until then when I converted them to PC)
It was a nice surprise and also a reward for the tremendous effort in creating these animations when I was given an opportunity to present short fragments from two of them on public TV. They were featured in a show by Mr Roman Kanciruk called ''The Stars Shine at Night'' (''Gwiazdy Świecą Nocą'') which unfortunately was later cancelled so that my homepage is currently the only place where you can see those animations...

This website was originally founded in early 2002 and in late September 2003 it was made into containing descriptions of ALL KNOWN satellites and The Solar System Encyclopaedia!
    In course of expanding my website I noticed that there is still very little known about most of the moons. I therefore decided to attempt at calculating some of the values for the known moons by myself, as far as my competence allows me to. Using some of the widely availible data (like the semimajor axis, magnitude and the radius of a moon) I believe I have succeeded in doing so. You can still check whether my calculations are correct for I have givene the formulae I have used along with a brief explanation... And believe me, in doing that you may find out for yourself how much FUN it is to make your own calculations for astronomical objects.

    In late February 2004 another major breakthrough was made as the works on translating the huge content of my homepage concluded and from this day on it is finally availible for viewers around the world as ''The Moons of the Solar System''.
    I have long dreamt of translating my homepage to English and even tried to do some kind of a "translation" myself. However, I was not really satisfied with the result. And then Mr Karol Pankowski, who is much more experienced in those matters, offered me to do the translation for me. Now all of my texts are translated into EXCELLENT English..
    Words fail to express my gratitude for his great work done with attention to expressing my thoughts in a correct and understandable way.

AND FINALLY...

kwsrae@poczta.onet.pl

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