Solar System Simulator

I always been obsessed with space exploration and astronomy, and since I was a child I played with telescopes and optical instruments.

I was just trying to show to a friend what you can expect from a cheap telescope when looking at the planets. I quickly downloaded an image of Saturn and set up in Nuke a simple comp to get the scale right and the view from the ocular. Then I tried the same with an image of Jupiter… and another one… Obviously I went a bit too far and after a couple of days I ended up with a complete 3D solar system / telescope simulator in Nuke.

The tool is designed to mimic the view from earth of the planets through a telescope. You can play with the focal length, oculars and Barlow lenses. Tweaking other parameters it is able to render a view from a “probe” in Voyager style. This is Mars with a 2.000 mm focal length and a 2x Barlow lens.

Clearly I had to be precise. Each planets has his own rotation, axis tilt and satellites. Please note the transit of Io in front of Jupiter and its shadow.

The entire system has also the correct scale. Each unit in nuke equals 1.000 Km, and each frame of the animation 1 hour. A bit of patience with some expressions and everything moves automatically. And yes, I also added Pluto, I felt sorry and re-introduced it in my solar system.