This dialog box contains photographic references for the body's visual characteristics.
Bodies' appearances have been approximated based on what a human with statistically normal color vision would see with the naked eye based on the best available information. Natural or "true" color in photography is a fairly complex (and somewhat subjective) topic, a thorough discussion of which is beyond the scope of this page. A more detailed exploration of the topic can be found here, though, should the question of precisely how accurate these renderings are require a better answer.
It also bears mentioning that some of the visual representations in these renderings are based on information collected during brief snapshots in time. The Voyager 2 and New Horizons missions revealed that even objects previously thought to be inert due to being in the coldest reaches of the solar system have cryovolcanic and atmospheric activity that can resurface large swaths of these bodies on seasonal and longer timescales.
Since humanity does not currently (2022) have a constant presence in the outer solar system and some bodies have not even completed even half of an orbit around the sun since their discovery (e.g. Pluto, discovered in 1930), in some cases the best available information will lack temporal fidelity, and even bodies for which there is ample information on dynamic visual characteristics may be rendered more statically for the sake of simplicity and performance.
Notes specific to model that aren't simply parameters.
This model doesn't have any notes.
This model was built using three.js. Some object properties have been excluded if they weren't considered very interesting regarding the model's rendering. Other properties not listed are either null or default values. For more information, three.js documentation is available here.
This page's purpose is for testing the rendering of texture maps on celestial bodies in our solar system. It is not meant to be a scientifically accurate representation of each body. The quality of these models has been judged against the artist's perception of how these objects should appear, informed by observations with the naked eye, through telescopes, and from photographs. In some cases, liberties have been taken where information is incomplete, with an attempt to make educated guesses but also placing importance on making objects "feel" realistic.
The passage of time has only vaguely realistic meaning in the cases of sun-orbiting bodies, whose orbits are simplified as circular for these tests. For natural satellites, the progression of time only rotates the bodies but does not move the light source. Rotation rate is an estimate and may be different than what is expected for a synodic rotation period depending on how much care was taken to maintain accuracy for each body.
The time rate slider maxes out at one revolution per second for each body. The time warp increases the rate of the animation by powers of ten times the maximum normal rate of rotation in both the positive and negative directions. The time multiple value given is scaled based on the rotation rate of each body. The rotation rate used may be sidereal or synodic depending on whether it was deemed important to go into such levels of specificity and what information was readily available. In most cases these values should be close enough for these rendering tests, so such specificity is unlikely.
Seasons are defined as for the northern hemisphere of each body. North is usually defined as in the general direction of Earth's orbital pole as defined using the right-hand rule. For bodies with 'reverse' spins, "north" could be flipped depending on the format of the data available.
Each season starts at the instant of its respective solstice or equinox. For the purposes of lighting, the orbit of each sun-orbiting body is assumed circular.
For natural satellites (i.e. moons), seasons may have a more convoluted meaning. In these cases, the angular location of the light source has been fixed to only control epochs, and polar orientation used is the moon's orbit normal vector at the J2000 epoch.
For Earth, the months are aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, so the month in the readout only corresponds to roughly the first ten days of the segment. The remaining roughly twenty days of the evenly divided segments will correspond to the following month.
Fixing the season by clicking on the checkbox to the upper right of the season slider will immediately stop the movement of the light source and remove any time warp factor that has been applied. This will also remove the time warp speed options, as they will be irrelevant if the direction of the light source is fixed.
Altitude is given as the distance from the surface of a sphere with the same diameter as body's maximum dimension. If the body has oblateness, other minor dimensions, or substantial topography, the altitude shown could differ substantially from the distance to the body's physical surface.
The positions of the stars and other extrasolar objects are approximate, based on J2000 right ascension and declination of the poles of the sun-orbiting bodies. For satellites of planets and other sun-orbiters (i.e. moons), the pole of the satellite's Laplace plane is assumed to be the parent body's rotational pole for the purposes of these rendering tests, even when this is not a good approximation (e.g. Iapetus). The satellite's inclination is then added to the parent body's rotational pole to obtain the declination of the satellite's pole (which may not correspond with J2000 orbital parameters for the satellites whose Laplace planes are effectively coplanar with the parent body's equator).
For the purposes of these rendering tests, the position of the sun is fixed relative to the position of the stars, even though some degree of parallax would be observed with camera movement, especially for bodies in the inner solar system.
Solar Radius is the average distance to the sun. For moons, this is the parent planet's distance to the sun.
Max radius is equivalent to the equatorial radius for spheroidal bodies. For irregularly shaped bodies and triaxial ellipsoids, this parameter refers to the half-width of the longest dimension of the body's bounding box.
Radius 2 refers to the polar radius for spheroids and to the half-width of the second-largest dimension for triaxial ellipsoids and irregularly shaped bodies.
Radius 3 refers to the half-width of the shortest dimension of the bounding box enclosing triaxial ellipsoids and irregularly shaped bodies.