I do astronomical renders all the time (well I am an astronomy lecturer!)... 
I simply choose a better base unit... Megametres, Gigametres or even AUs 
instead of kilometres.

1 AU = 149597870.691km
        = 149597.870691Mm
        = 149.597870691Gm

Even Sedna's orbit is now only 75-975 AU or 11219.7-145857Gm... The only 
slight problem there is that Sedna is only 0.0015Gm across!

One of these days I'm going to finish my SolarSystem toolkit include file!

Rarius

"Nekar Xenos" <nek### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message 
news:47e8ce0b@news.povray.org...
>

> news:47e7f1fc$1@news.povray.org...
>> High!
>>
>> Once more with my long-cherished Solar System project... originally I 
>> equalled 1 POV unit = 1 km - which pretty soon turned out to be 
>> unfeasible, as the Sun is several times farther even from Mercury than 
>> PoV-Ray's epsilon value would allow it to be rendered correctly, let 
>> alone the other celestial bodies in the Solar System.
>>
>> So I introduced a scale value, based on the aphelion (furthest point of 
>> orbit from the Sun) of trans-Kuiper Belt object Sedna, and adjusted it 
>> dynamically to the distance between camera and the Sun (or any other 
>> body):
>>
>
> I hope future versions of Pov-Ray will fix this problem. A lot of Povers 
> love doing astronomical stuff =)
>
>
> -- 
> -Nekar Xenos-
>

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