u/Gregrox

The September 1859 Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded on Earth, the result of an eruption of solar plasma towards the Earth. The geomagnetic storm resulted in low-latitude daytime auroras, and caused telegraph operators to get electric shocks and to be able to operate their telegraphs with the power source disconnected. If it happened today, there would be mass devastation to all electronic infrastructure. This event was important in heliophysics as it resulted in the discovery of Solar Flares.

This digital painting is a reproduction of what the Sun would have looked like with adequate filtration on 1859 September 1st at 11:20 AM GMT, for about 5 minutes or so. The drawing has been dimmed to adequately represent the difference in intensity between the photosphere and the flare with the limited dynamic range available to computer screens. To Carrington, the flare would have appeared on his projection screen more like a brilliantly luminous star upon the face of an already quite bright white sun.

White light flares occuring on the Photosphere (or surface) of the Sun like this are incredibly rare (thank goodness), although in modern times it is not unusual to see flares in the Sun's atmosphere, or Chromosphere, using specialized filtered telescopes. I have seen one or two myself.

^(As always, this art was hand made by me using a Huion drawing tablet and the software FireAlpaca; no a.i. was used in the production of this image whatsoever.)

Two twin Hycean planets--that is, Ocean planets with Hydrogen atmospheres. They are seen with a telescope from an interstellar space probe orbiting another planet in the system.

Both are superearth (~9x Earth mass, ~3 Earth radii) planets orbiting the M3V red dwarf star TE-346.

TE-346 c (foreground) has hydrochloric acid rich oceans and a chlorinated atmosphere, thought to be the result of some form of extremophile microbial life in the ocean. The chlorine in the atmosphere causes the cyan tint along the limb and the yellow tint on the clouds.

TE-346 c is tidally locked, keeping one side always facing the star. Consequently, atmospheric superrotation and constant heating on the day side produces a symmetrical pattern of vortices west of the substellar spot.

TE-346 d (background) is almost the same mass and density as c, but was at some point subject to a giant impact which tilted it and spun it up to near breakup speed, resulting in the extremely oblate or lenticular figure. Its satellite and ring system is expected to be short lived due to stellar tides.

Digital painting of Jupiter, as it appeared from Earth on 1880 November 1st at 9:00 EST. Based on an illustration by Étienne Trouvelot published in 1882. South is towards the top of the image.

The Great Red Spot is seen here as an enormous red-orange oval three Earth-diameters across. It is a hurricane-like storm in Jupiter's atmosphere that by 1880 was only a few decades old. It has lasted all the way through to the modern day, although it has been shrinking ever since.

This image also depicts a double-transit of the Galilean moons Io and Europa, along with their shadows.

My previous drawing of 1880s Jupiter was a hybrid of various late 19th century depictions of the planet. But the fact that it didn't really depict Jupiter as it ever actually looked was bugging me, so I decided to do a study on one of the drawings I used as reference for the previous drawing: Trouvelot's drawing of a double moon/shadow transit on Jupiter on November 1st 1880.

Trouvelot's drawing of Jupiter (and many others) can be found here.

This is a pastel illustration from Étienne Trouvelot's 1882 book The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, based on observations he made with the 26" Great Refractor at the U.S. Naval Observatory in 1880.

In my astronomy circles this is a notorious image for how exaggerated and cartoony its features are. I think that's what really drew me to this image in particular. There's so much detail here... but none of it looks at all realistic. So what did it really look like that would have led to the very... creative depiction by Trouvelot?

The black beads on Trouvelot's drawing correspond to the latitudes where we see elongated oval 'brown barges,' a type of storm found largely in the northern hemisphere of Jupiter. The billowing clouds on the equator look like an exaggerated view of the arching swirling festoons sometimes visible on the equatorial zone. The dark North & South Equatorial Belts were interpreted as both being partly covered by white cloud layers, in order to result in the particular banding pattern seen in the drawing. The scale of the Red Spot was taken from photos and sketches of around the same time which were not quite so exaggerated.

Some image variants, including a simulated view of Jupiter through the eyepiece of the 26" Great Refractor, can be found here.

I digitally edited this pastel drawing of Jupiter by Étienne Trouvelot, published 1882, so it would appear in 3D. I added limb darkening, reprojected Trouvelot's drawing at a slightly different angle, erased the transiting moons, and redrew the moons in a new location.

This is a spin-off of my digitally painted photorealistic reproduction of this very cartoony drawing, which can be found here.

Now that the WIFPIC 6 is installed, the Kerbal Space Program just released this picture of the gas giant Jool and its moons taken with the Untitled Space Telescope. The fun thing is that beforehand they also sent out a notice requesting amateur astronomers take their own pictures at approximately the same time so as to provide for a scientific comparison. (But we're pretty sure it's mostly just because they wanted to show off how much better the UST is.)

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I wanted to draw a realistic version of Jool, but not just the 'modern' version of Jool in KSP 1.10 in 2020 and KSP2 in 2023 which uses Jupiter as a basis. No, I mean the original hand-painted 2012 KSP 0.17 version. And this was the result.

^(This digital painting was hand painted using a Huion drawing tablet and the software FireAlpaca. As always, absolutely no a.i. was used in the creation of this drawing.)

Digital painting of the giant planet Jupiter as it may have appeared in the 1880s or so in approximately true color. This was based on a number of sources from the 1880s and 1890s, and is sort of a hybridized view of about a decade or two of Jovian sketches and early photography.

At this time, the famous planet-sized hurricane, the Great Red Spot, was a few decades old and very very large. It has been shrinking ever since then, and is now less than a third of the size it was in the 1880s.

The reference used contained, as well as modern imagery, the historical photographs: A.A. Common in London in 1879 and Lick Observatory in 1890. As well, the historical drawings: a cartoonishly exaggerated drawing by Étienne Trouvelot on 1880 November 1, and a more restrained and realistic sketch by Thomas Elger in November 1881.

The positions of the moons and their shadows is based on the evening of 1880 November 1, a few hours after Trouvelot's drawing, although the features depicted are a hybrid spanning the 1880s-90s.

License: CC-BY 4.0. Attribute to Luna Rose Brannon or Whirligig-Girl.

^(As always, this was drawn digitally by hand using a Huion tablet and the software Firealpaca. No a.i. generated imagery was used in this image whatsoever.)

Digital painting of the giant planet Jupiter as it may have appeared in the 1880s or so in approximately true color. This was based on a number of sources from the 1880s and 1890s, and is sort of a hybridized view of about a decade or two of Jovian sketches and early photography.

At this time, the famous planet-sized hurricane, the Great Red Spot, was a few decades old and very very large. It has been shrinking ever since then, and is now less than a third of the size it was in the 1880s.

License: CC-BY 4.0. attribute as Luna Rose Brannon or Whirligig-Girl.

Digital painting of the red giant star Betelgeuse and its newly discovered companion Siwarha. Simulations suggest giant stars have a small number of enormous convection cells rather than a huge amount of continent-sized convection cells as on the Sun, and that their photospheres are not a hard boundary but rather smoothly deform into a corona.

Betelgeuse is 640 times the size of the Sun (or 2.98 au radius). It is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun. But as opposed to the Sun's 5800 K surface temperature, Betelgeuse is only 3800 Kelvins, leading to an almost candle-like yellow-orange glow.

Siwarha is depicted here as a K-dwarf, 2/3rds the mass of the Sun. It is thought to be responsible for a 6-year-long periodic change in Betelgeuse's apparent brightness--It casts a wake behind it as it travels through Betelgeuse's nebulous and dusty corona.

^(Digitally hand-painted using a Huion tablet and FireAlpaca software. As always, no a.i. whatsoever was used in the production of this image.)

These hypothetical early-universe objects are as large as star systems and as bright as galaxies--they superficially resemble stars, but instead of being held up by radiation pressure generated by nuclear fusion, they are held up by radiation pressure from matter accreting into the black hole.

This is version 2 of the illustration, with feedback from Dr. Begelman, an expert in the field of quasistar research. All of this was digitally hand-painted in FireAlpaca, no a.i. whatsoever.

The Zwonmu System, part of my multimedia project of works set on and around the planet Gymnome and featuring its slimegirl inhabitants.

Worldbuilding Posts: Tumblr

Train puzzle videogame set on Gymnome: Freight Misconductor

Kerbal Space Program planet mod set in the ZwoNmu system: Goobal Slime World

Star Trek Lower Decks fanfiction featuring a Gymnomi Slime: The Starfleet Slimegirl series.

Designed to explore the four ice giants of the ZwoNmu system: Glarpi, Shpler (pictured), Eauah, and Flibul, this rocket is technically a Federation ship, belonging to the United Mellanus Space Program. One of the conditions for Mellanus joining the Federation during the Dominion War was that they would be given exclusive space exploration rights to their own solar system and 15 lightyears of surrounding space.

But they are only barely post-warp, and they developed warp drive a little on the early side to begin with.

Mellanoid Slime spacecrafts use a peculiar propulsion technology: Fission-Impulse. These engines use fission reactors in the form of a nuclear thermal rocket, but with the exhaust velocity and thrust power artificially increased by use of impulse drive coils powered by an additional nuclear fission reactor. The performance is far inferior to a proper impulse drive, but superior to the previously available nuclear thermal rockets.

The warp reactor is replaced with a capacitor bank charged by the five fission reactors making up the impulse drive. As a result it can only make short FTL hops before recharging, but this is still better than waiting decades coasting through interplanetary space.

Waste heat on a starship is generally rejected directly into subspace via a subspace heat sink, but with subspace technology still being a fairly underdeveloped field on Mellanus, traditional glowing red-hot heat radiators are used. In this case, liquid droplet radiators. (Mellanoid Slimes will of course prefer a fluidic solution to a problem when given the opportunity)

This ship, reconfigured into the USS Liberty, plays a role in my Lower Decks OC-focused fanfic Surviving Schwil. https://archiveofourown.org/works/56540020/chapters/143695525

Commission for my friend Jenny from 2024 for her Star Trek Adventures campaign, depicting the Intrepid-derived USS Curiosity encountering a low tech alien stealth ship in a region of space similar to the Badlands.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/74364026/chapters/194111486

digital painting from September 2025.

Commission for my friend Levana of a Federation space ship from a fanfic called Contrail A Mile Wide: the USS Bian Que, a freighter ship converted to have a permanent hospital module and repair bay module, rather than modular cargo containers, and also the absurdly fast but very tiny Rescue Boat 01 attached to it.

I wanted to make some ships which were clearly TOS era while not just being straightforward kitbashes of the TOS Starship-class Enterprise.

The saucer is circular but the bulge on the bottom is a completely different shape to the Starship class. The grille on the neck is supposed to be some kind of deflector dish, and the resulting u-shape was duplicated in a few other places. I made the bussard collectors elongated but not conical (I kind of can't stand TOS era designs with nosecone-like bussard collectors). The phaser dome on the bottom of the primary hull of the Starship-class is absent, presumably there are hatches that open to reveal NX-style phaser cannons.

The Rescue Boat's main hull is inspired by the Archer class fanon ship, but with the oversized warp nacelles specified by the fanfic. It's supposed to be one of those "bigger than a shuttle, smaller than a ship" types. The hexagonal bit on the end of the secondary hull is an impulse engine, and the circular bit above it is meant to bring to mind the impulse engine deck on the *Constitution-*class Enterprise refit.

locomotive number sevenoc-two, a narrow gauge 2-6-6-6 mallet tank engine on planet Gymnome, built in the 2280s. These engines suffered from adhesion issues as they used the water in their front tender, even moreso than a garratt (since with a garratt, both engines carry the weight of the boiler, rather than only one). Thus, these were quite slippery locomotives.

The wheelslip was mediated by the limited supply of steam into the front low pressure engine. If it did slip, it would quickly run out of steam until the rear high pressure engine could use and exhaust its own steam to refill the low pressure cylinders. But when used in simple expansion mode (for example, when starting), there was nothing but the enginemaid's skill to prevent slipping.

These locomotives were built by the same designer as the prolific Construct class of broad gauge garratt locomotives.