I was taking some digital camera pictures through my telescope recently and
thought that it would be a great thing to try and duplicate in POV-Ray.  The air
turbulence and haze and general telescopic appearance seemed perfect to try and
mimic.
I had taken both night-time (never got one that looked bright enough) and
day-time photos with a 640x480 resolution camera through the eyepiece (yes, the
eyepiece) of a 4" SCT scope of 1200 focal length and 18mm lens, making for a 67
power magnification.
Anyway, these two renders are surprisingly similar to what I could see with my
eyes but not quite what turned out on the camera.  So you can see for yourselves
the attachments are both real and raytraced, you'll just have to believe me when
I say POV-Ray did much closer to the real thing than the photos did.
BTW, the photos were reduced in size by half to get rid of the ugly pixelization
and I post-processed the renders to add some ugliness-- I meant photographic--
look to them  :-)

Bob
--
omniVerse http://users.aol.com/persistenceofv/all.htm

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