Astronomical stuff

[ffutures]

For the Weinbaum RPG I need pictures of the outer planets. I don't particularly want to use photos, they rarely print well and use an inordinate amount of ink, I'd prefer black and white line drawings.

Anyone know of a copyright-free or expired source? Preferably reasonably detailed, but accuracy isn't actually a huge issue since I'm not looking at terrain maps. Can't seem to find quite what I want via Google, I'm wondering if there is something like a 1920s-30s text book that has gone out of copyright and is on line somewhere.

Later - I've decided to bite the bullet and go with colour, using a watercolour effect on NASA photos, but make the colours fairly pale so that they don't saturate printer paper too much.

Comments

[lillian13.livejournal.com]

Try the Dover catalog. I've had great luck with them for other things.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'll take a look.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Sketching from observation is still done among amateur astronomers. It wouldn't be copyright-free, but I'm sure that you could negotiate down to a mention in the credits. On the downside, I doubt that there are many amateurs who can resolve Uranus and Neptune on their instruments. Not that there's an awful lot to sketch, anyway....

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've looked at some, but what I need is more like an artist's impression than complete realism.

[ponderoid.livejournal.com]

Pretty much anything you find from NASA or any other U.S. federal gov't agency is in the public domain. I think there are automatic programs that will take a photo and make it appear hand-drawn. PS or Gimp filters, or something like that.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Trying that now - results so far aren't brilliant, but I shall persevere.

Pioneer Data

[ponderoid.livejournal.com]

Some or all of the Pioneer probes returned their image data in a format that wasn't easy/convenient with the computers of the time to automatically convert into a pretty picture. The engineers had to hand-draw and hand-color their impression of the raw data.

When searching, I found these PD artist conceptions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer_10_at_Jupiter.gif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer_11_at_Saturn.gif

There are some more artist conceptions from NASA here and there at wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_program

*** Ponder

Re: Pioneer Data

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Don't really want the space probes, but thanks for the thought.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/22700/22778/planets_22778.htm

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not quite what I had in mind, but thanks anyway.