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uranus texture map

I painted this map pretty much from scratch, based on images found around the internet. Generally, Uranus looks like a featureless grey-green ball in most of the photographs on the net, but I found some Hubble pictures which clearly showed some transient white streaks in the atmosphere. I also found a contrast enhanced image of the atmosphere which clearly showed a gradient of color from the pole to the equator. There is a brownish smog which is concentrated at the poles, which gets progressively lighter as you move down to the equator. The contrast enhancement also showed some darkish streaks.

Uranus is unusual in that its axis of rotation is perpendicular to its orbit around the sun. It also has some very faint rings, disovered in 1977, which surround the planet in an eliptical pattern, also perpendicular to its solar orbit.

1024 x 512 color image map.

See my notes on the Saturn page for application of these maps. For the sample image I applied the transparency map as a soft alpha, and then modulated the transparency further with a noise procedural texture to knock the rings back even more.



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