EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com NAME: Bob Franke TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Unbelievable Flying Objects COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 TOOLS USED: Nathan Kopp's lnsflare.inc, Bob Franke's wDem2Tga, Lview Pro for jpeg conversion and copyright POV editor RENDER TIME: 25 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 w/ 128 Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was returning home from a business trip when he made a detour into the Yakima, Washington area to help in an aerial search for a missing C-46 marine transport. Is was a crystal clear day, perfect for conducting a search. At around 3:00 AM he was flying near Mount Rainier, when a flash of light caught his eye. He turned and saw a procession of nine very strange objects flying from north to south. Arnold estimated their size at about two-thirds that of a DC-4, and he calculated their speed at over 1500 mph by timing their travel between two mountain peaks of known distance. Arnold initially described the objects as flat discs, like pie tins, very shiny, moving erratically, like a "saucer would if you skipped it across water." From this description a reporter coined the phrase, "flying saucer" in a newspaper article the next day. This started a flood of sightings in the Pacific Northwest in the following several months. To this day most UFO's are described as looking very much like a saucer. Kenneth Arnold is no crack pot and did not claim to see alien space craft. He thought the objects were secret military aircraft. However, he later change his description of the objects to be crescent like and this is what I show in my image. This sighting is generally considered the beginning of UFO sightings in the US. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I downloaded the 1:250,000-Scale Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data for Washington State from URL http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/doc/edchome/ndcdb/ndcdb.html. I used my wDem2Tga program to create the three 16-bit tga heightfield images from three DEM data sets. You may download a copy of wDem2Tga from the Utility page of my POV web site. I used Nathan Kopp's lnsflare include file, but could not get it to work with POVRay 3.1, so I rendered with version 3.0. The atmospheric haze is ground fog. The landscape heightfield uses a gradient texture. The rest of the image is simple constructive solid geometry. To save space, the heightfields are not included. Well, that's about it. Hope you like the image.