EMAIL: jull43@ij.net NAME: Matthias M. Giwer TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: NASA Moon Coverup Revealed! COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/jull43 RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1e TOOLS USED: Photoshop for image map conversion and formatting RENDER TIME: 1m30s HARDWARE USED: PII/333 128M Win98 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Massive NASA Coverup! The real first image of the dark side of the moon. Ever wondered why the moon only has one face to the earth at all times? You would know if it were not for this NASA coverup. Inspired by a short story in Astounding from the 1950s, title and author escape me. The pilot is on the first trip around the moon to look at the dark side. And this is what he sees. He can even see the paint strokes of the craters. And then he goes insane. Insanity, the consequence of learning that reality is not what we imagine it to be. At the end it is revealed it was a flight simulation he had been hypnotized to believe was real. He was to fall asleep before actually seeing the backside of the moon but did not. It was just a mockup for the simulation and the budget did not permit finishing the dark side and the hypnotic instruction to fall asleep was a cheap work around. I remember being disappointed that the story was not illustrated with what he saw. Now I realize that would have given away the punch line. Not that Campbell was ever adverse to doing that with illustrations. But now I have finally seen it. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The moon is differencing two spheres and a torus clipped_by a plane. The torus scaled down greatly in y (in default creation orientation) to make it approximate a disk and give me a thick hemisphere. The lit side of the moon is an image map of the moon. The resolution is kept down for the paint strokes. The starfield is a granite texture with a color map that is mostly black. The sun in an internally lit sphere and the primary light in the scene. A spotlight at the camera position, flashgun if you will, is required to light the hollow interior of the moon because the sun being the source. Lens flare? NASA never had a camara as bad as in Hollywood. Maybe NASA goes downhill in 18 month, i.e. in 2001.