Hadn't really gone into guessing how you did it but I went ahead and was making
my own yesterday after seeing yours here.  That, and I was trying to help
someone with a planet/moon orbit question at the moray.win group.
I used an arealight for the sun and it seemed to be okay enough, also used the
spotlight behind the Earth concept.  Not much of any other way I know to cast
light on shadowed regions in space :-) Already did the negative light for the
umbral part of the shadow too, and a second one to try and mimic the apparent
darkness of the beginning/ending eclipse.  'no_shadow' is out because of the way
it illuminates all sides.
I've yet to add image maps, was just getting the layout done, and although I
have the POV Planetarium files here I've never had a lot of success getting
specific camera positions right.  Will take a look at what your working on.
Here's my try at the lunar eclipse so far.

Bob

"Chris Jeppesen" <chr### [at] digiquillcom> wrote in message
news:388a5e51@news.povray.org...
| 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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