Red Star Fly-by

I was fascinated by the Breakthrough Starshot Project to send a probe to another star system. They think it will take 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30 years to make the trip, and 4 years to send the pictures back. By then, my age will be triple digits and I just might not be around to see it. So, I decided to create my own version of what it might look like.

I started the animation earlier this year but got distracted with other things. This week I got back to work on it. It is a simulation of what a space probe flying through an exo-stellar system would see. I used the animation program Blender.

I created mini star system in Blender. I tried to make it to scale, so the distances and plant/star sizes were appropriate. I did make the planets on the large side, so they’d show up better. I created a path for the probe and created a camera that followed the route. I had to go back to my old geometry skills to work it out. Wikipedia was very valuable.

I'd dropped it mainly because I had trouble getting the camera to point where I wanted it to point. If the probe was travelling at 20% the speed of light, it would pass through the system is about 7 minutes. At 24 frames a second, that worked out to 10710 frames. To save time, I just specified positions and orientations for only about 30 frames and let Blender interpolate the others. The interpolations were kind of wonky.

I went back and recalculated the positions and orientations for about every 48 frames, or about 190 frames. When the probe was changing direction, or rotating faster, I used shorter time intervals. For the most part it works OK now, although there are a few glitches I need to fix. Some of the interpolations are strange. I don’t understand why.

I created a star scape back ground to make it look more realistic. That took me several tries to get right. I did a test run to see how it looks. I feel good about it.

I have some other changes I’d like to make. My artistic skills leave something to be desired, so I used images of various planets and moons in our solar system. Some of them are too recognizable, so I want to find a way to make something a little more alien. I don’t know how I will do that yet.

I also want to add a few moons to the system. Mainly to help illuminate the dark sides of some planets so they’re more visible.

I hope to get this done quickly, before I get side tracked again.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog