The clouds parted over my site and I was able to see most of the eclipse.
First
one I have ever seen in person. It was great!

The positions of the bodies were calculated using PovSolarSystem v0.02,
which
I will release shortly. This version is vastly improved and includes the
Moon
for the first time. I could go into detail about how I made it, but its
better if you
just go to www.kwansystems.org and read all about it.

I have never had much success with area lights. This was no exception. I
couldnt
get a good area light to work for the sun, so I sprinkled 50 point lights
randomly
on a sphere the size of the sun.

I put a dim orange spot light just behind the earth pointed away from the
sun
to get the orange shadow tint. Having never seen an eclipse before, I didnt
know
that the center of the shadow would be so much dimmer than the edge. I am
working on an improved version now, with an added negative brightness spot
light to cancel out some of the shadow tint in the center.

I rendered it in PovWin (Took 13 hours, far longer than the eclipse itself!)
and made an MPEG using mpeg_encode for Linux. I used 800x640 resolution
because thats what it takes to get a proper aspect on a 1280x1024 screen.
I used VMmeg 1.7, a very old but reliable mpeg player to run it. It seems
like MS Media Player doesnt like anything over 320x240.

I hope this answers your questions.

Chris


Bob Hughes <omn### [at] hotmailcom?subject=PoV-News:> wrote in message
news:3889f05a@news.povray.org...
> This was real neat to see, both in animation and real life.  It was a good
lunar
> eclipse.  Saw a total eclipse once that got very dark gray-blue then a
deep rust
> red as it emerged, another was very red all over and could have passed for
being
> Mars.  This one was probably number three in rank of the ones I've seen,
too bad
> I haven't seen any more than those 3 total ones.  A few other partial ones
too,
> just not as colorful.
> The representation you have done here is nice and I'm wondering how you
went
> about it.  I had thought of doing one too but to try and mimic the others
I've
> seen also.
>
> Bob
>

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