I've been rendering with POV for several years (since POV 2!) but it wasn't
until about a year ago that I realised that I could use it to produse very
nice 2D diagrams...

The following image is totally scripted. It is one of twelve that are to be
used in an Astronomical Almanac. The original image is 1425 pixels square
(ie 300dpi on an A5 page) and takes about 1m41s to render with AA set to 0.3

The stars were created by a little VB program (that I wrote) which converted
the public domain "Bright Star Catalogue" to an include file, each star
being a macro invokation. The constellation lines, labels and object markers
and labels are hand positioned macro invokations. The Milky Way is an image
map created from an all sky photographic survey.

The whole system can be used to render the sky from anywhere on Earth and at
any time of the night or year.

The only thing missing are the planets... I'm still working on getting their
positions correct given just a date!

Rarius

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'Almanac.jpg' (57 KB)

Preview of image 'Almanac.jpg'