# Mapping Resources > Tutorials/How-To >  The Solar System: September, AD 15605

## töff

What DO you call a tutorial that's not good for anything except how to make one specific map?

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## RPMiller

I would call it "a tutorial to make this map" and let others decide if they can use it for other things.  :Wink:

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## töff

I'm in the initial brainstorming stages of this map. (Although I can already see the finished product in my head, I know damn well that such a project changes considerably as it grows.)

I'm thinking, I'll just use this thread as a Project Blog, and maybe at the end I'll post over in the Finished Maps area. We'll sort out whether to call it a "tutorial" later. Maybe others can pick up a few techniques here & there but I don't think it'll be much as a tutorial per se. Bah, giddy on my Featured Map scroll, maybe I was just hoping to get a Tute badge also. Hah.

The first thing I am concerned about is scale. Scale, in astronomy, is very difficult to deal with. If you get the orbit of Pluto into scale, you can't see Mercury and Venus. I am intending to abstract the scale completely. But, that leads to a parallax problem between planets. If I get all the planets into the proper zodiacal locations for 15605/09, but I discard the proprotionality of the orbits, then this graphic will only function accurately from the viewpoint of the sun; the angles and distances between any two planets will be utterly wonked.

Oooh, idea: maybe I can rig some sort of abstract logarithmic graphic element to represent the scale quantities that are lost by giving up the realworld orbital radii. Hmm! I have no idea what it would look like. That concept needs to cook for a while in the back of my head.

Another thing I am considering is artistic style. I want a semi-medieval, celestial spheres sort of thing, Copernican with a taste of Flammarion. This ought to be a lot of fun and I hope I can balance antiquity with futuristic scientificality. The one could easily overwhelm the other. Me wants both.

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## töff

> some sort of abstract logarithmic graphic element to represent the scale quantities that are lost by giving up the realworld orbital radii. Hmm! I have no idea what it would look like.


Ooh, it's clicking! I can feel it  :Smile:  note to self: nonconcentric arcs! (Will I have any idea what that means a month from now? Even if I do, will it work? Stayed tuned, same bat channel.)

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## SeerBlue

I like the way you think :Smile: , it sounds very spontaneous. SeerBlue

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## töff

LOL, thanks, you make it sound like a good thing  :Smile: 

A grid of sorts has manifested itself in the plan. Granted, it's a round grid, but a grid nonetheless. The X dimension is the planetary orbits, from 0 @ the sun to 100% @ the Oort Cloud. The Y dimension, which sadly enough begins with Z, is the Zodiac, from, well, hell I dunno where it starts, Sagittarius is at the galactic center so maybe I'll start there, but anyway it's a circle .. but if you unroll that circle, you'd get a 12-point line for Y, to go with the X orbits.

Now, I am a big one for using color to distinguish visual elements. I dunno what kind of color I will use across these two dimensions. I could alternate two colors across the Zodiac, making a stripey thing, purple-orange-purple-orange ... or maybe I can use yellow-orange for the summer signs and blues for the winter -- no that won't work, summer & winter are complements at the poles, there's no such thing as a winter month for the whole planet, hmm. I might start with white at the sun and work out through yellow and red and purple to blue at the fringe. That sounds good. But that takes the whole spectrum! What's left for the Zodiac?

Are you sure spontaneous thinking is the way to go?

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## Sigurd

How 'bout some sort of colour shade to denote orbit distance on a log scale. You could do the inkiness of space in black and the relative size of moon or orbit as a blue shade?

or not,

Sigurd

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## töff

That's what my half-an-idea spectral orbit color was heading to, I think.

I can run a "to scale" color strip in the legend!

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## töff

I'm not sure what you mean about the moons as a shade of blue ...?

I was thinking about moons yesterday and I dunno what I will do with them. I don't want a string of moons off to the side of each planet ... that would be kinda ugly and what would I do with the 4 planets that have ring systems? (5 if you count Pluto cuz I added one there, a micro-asteroid-belt kinda thing). But if I show moons as orbits, that's a durn lotta extra circles all over the map. Doesn't Jupiter have like 60+ moons? I can't include that many anyway. Maybe I'll end up with a string. Shoot. I dunno.

Today I hope to learn the positions of the planets for the date in question. I have a copy of the awesome Starry Night astronomy software and I think I rigged it for AD 15605 once before. Wish me luck :p

Oh, new idea. I could _write_ this map in the story as animated ink. Then the heroine could just set the date for what she wants, and all the planets move to the proper positions. She might even gripe about it not being to scale. Hmm, just a thought. The printed map, obviously, will be a still image. I'm not gonna do this as an interactive Flash video with a built-in astronomy database. Sorry, I ain't got the time and I ain't nowhere near good enough with Flash. It would be cool, though, huh.

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## töff

That means the date will be like a scroll-wheel odometer. Hah!

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## altasilvapuer

To me, it looks like a good base for creating landforms on a Mars-like planet.  Some tweaking here and there, and crazy layer styles and/or blend modes, and I think it could work well.  I see a huge shield volcano-type thing, personally.

Nice find!

-asp

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## töff

Somehow, my *"orbital tracks" ended up with unequal spacing* between :\ so I'm redoing them. That's OK because I want to work the pancake texture into that part.

Funny how much of a project you can spend lots of time on, only to throw it out.

Also, I *gave up the rotated canvas*. I'll just work straight to the page, now. it worked for Ceres but it was becoming too much of a hassle to do the borders at an angle. But STARTING from an angle gave me the necessary crop area, so it wasn't a wasted effort.

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## töff

LOL. Suddenly I remembered that I need the sun in the (offset) middle of this thing.

So I grabbed some images of the sun & composited them and ran out some glow streaks.

I tried to give the middle of it some luminance. Luminance is tough in printing. All you can do, really, is reveal the white paper underneath. Any imagery or ink you add just reduces that whiteness. It amounts to "add darkness everywhere else."

Too bad I don't have luminous ink.

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## töff

> Somehow, my *"orbital tracks" ended up with unequal spacing* between


Oh, I see how that happened. Doh. I spaced them equally on-center, but they have various widths. Crap ... even my redo is wrong. LOL.

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## altasilvapuer

That is one amazing sun, Töff!

You should consider a brief tutorial on how you created some of these celestial bodies, sometime.

Repped!
-asp

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## töff

Thanks.

Didn't I include how I made the planets, earlier?

Basically I jsut got surface textures (most of them easily found thru Google) and wrapped them around spheres in a 3D app (in my case, 3DS max 2010). I gave the spheres some specularity to make them look more kinda like painted wooden balls.

Pretty soon I need to start dropping them into the map and rotating them into position.

But I gotta get the stinkin' orbital tracks regimanted first. Sheesh. Devil's in the details, ya know?

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## altasilvapuer

D'oh!  You did already cover it; I had completely forgotten.

Can't wait to see the planets in their tracks.

-asp

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## töff

> That is one amazing sun ... a brief tutorial


For the sun, I just layed 2 or 3 different pictures of the sun over each other, fiddled with the modes (like Screen or HardLight), and masked them up.

For the rays, I made a layer, added a boatload of noise, did a radial zoom blur, then masked its edges ... then used it as a mask for a pure red layer.

For the middle glow, I just bumped the levels way up (and masked the levels adjustment layer).

Here's the PSCS4 file if anybody wants to dig into it and see: http://www.adrive.com/public/a72806b...95eaad6e8.html

Basically, it's just the approach of "lemme dick around with this awesome tool and see if I can make something that looks half decent."

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## töff

So, the new orbital tracks ...

I finally got them spaced equally. I know, there's some gaps. But those are for the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the Heliopause. I think. I don't remember. Anyway, they were intentional. The Asteroid Belt and the gas giants all have double-wide tracks.I used those tracks to mask that awesome pancake texture. I had taken that texture into Photoshop and thrashed it for a while, trying to disguise it -- turned it blue, did funky shading -- but honestly, it's just too cool a texture not to use as is. I know, it's kinda obviously a pancake here, but by the time everything else gets layered in, it won't be so obvious. Then I want to give the inner edge of each track a highlight, and the outer edge a shadow -- the idea being that the sun in the middle is gonna light their inner edges -- get it? I couldn't find an easy way to do that in PS. I'm all about doing things the easy way. I could done it one track at a time, through some clever slection & deselection and masking etc., but I wanted an easier method. I went back to Illustrator and just made a gradient fill with a buncha whites & blacks, their points aligned to the tracks. It's not perfect, and I might fiddle some more ... or I might not. So, my funny gradient as HardLight on top of the pancake, and it looks like I wanted it to, kinda 3D.Then for kicks I ran black & white lines around the middles of the tracks, and blurred them, to make it look like slots where the planets roll or slide or whatever. I might fiddle more with the slots, too.

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## töff

The zodiac shading is gonna help disguise the pancake around the outer edges.

Here's a rough view.

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## töff

I threw a few planets on there.

It almost starts to look kinda cool.

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## Coyotemax

Oooh that's pretty!

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## Steel General

Really neat stuff...but Holy Gradients Batman!  :Smile:

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## töff

I am moving onto the Moon Ribbons.

They have such a cool name, I just hadda post it here!

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## Steel General

That is a cool name, so what are they?

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## töff

*New ring discovered around Saturn is largest in Solar System*

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6864286.ece

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## töff

> That is a cool name, so what are they?


They are holders for the moons, to extend from the planets. I don't want to muddle the overall concept with moon-orbit rings around each planet. I'll just extend a little strip from a planet and lay its moons out in a row. Not sure if I will align each moon ribbon to its planetary orbital tracks or all of them to the map frame itself. Gotta play with it.

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## Ascension

I know they are named alphabetically by year of discovery, but I don't remember what letter they are up to, I want to say G but probably wrong there.  Cool.

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## töff

This is how people travel where I come from.

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## Ascension

Terrell Owens could use one of those instead of his hyperbaric chamber.  Wait, so could I   :Smile:

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## rdanhenry

Strictly speaking, you cannot avoid time dilation, but I assume what you mean is that if you took a gravbubble from Earth to a nearby star system some 11 light year away, spent a year exploring that system and came back, you'd be about 23 years older, just like the folks at home. This severely limits the usefulness of your fast gravbubble drive unless you use sleeper ships or humans are nigh-immortal and have high boredom thresholds. I wouldn't want to spent years in a cramped spaceship with no outside contact, only to be an old man when we reached our mission objective 40 light years away. This is not necessarily a bad thing, I just wanted to make sure you were aware that avoiding relativity effects in this way hampers rather than encourages exploration beyond the nearest stars. Probably not going to find a habitable world this way (and only very maybe one that can be made habitable with awesome future tech) unless you use one of the outs I mentioned. (Nor does there appear to be any reason why being in a gravbubble should influence relativistic effects.)

Your solar system is starting to look pretty amazing.

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## töff

The idea is that, because the person is not moving within the gravbubble, there's no time dilation. But I'll also admit that I've reintroduced the concept of the ether into that particular future-speculative storyworld. Also, humans are are both near-immortal (advanced med tech) and they have sleeper tech of many sorts available if they want it, including a time-stoppage-by-balanced-supergravity technique. But yes, we travel at the speed of light, without time dilation, is the bottom line. Note that it does take time to accelerate up to the speed of light; but, because you are only moving a near-massless point, and you're not experiencing that acceleration inside the bubble, you can push as hard as you want with your engine. I think the fastest I've used so far was 133g, which reaches lightspeed in 2.5 days. I have a calculator for it here: http://lattice.mysteryandmagic.com/r...#gravityengine

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## töff

Time dilation is a factor of the passenger (and therefore the vehicle) experiencing acceleration up into significantly relativistic speeds. That takes an immense amount of energy, and it also exposes the vehicle (and therefore the passenger) to hazards such as a few molecules of dust hitting your ship with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It's really just not the way to go.

Of course, we don't have gravbubbles or warp drives in real life, so the only practical method of space travel we have in the foreseeable future is extreme velocity, so we'd better learn how to deal with it. The Bussard ramjet, while designed as a fuel-gathering system, has the interesting side benefit of removing space dust from your path.

Of course, science is making incredible theoretical leaps, which usually translate into practical technologies. So maybe we will have warp drive ships or wormhole gates or something equally cool. Heck, we have Kirk's communicator now. With apps! Who'd'a thunk that would become a real thing back when we were eating burgers on TV trays in the late 60s and watching Joan Collins get run over by a truck.

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