Hello community,
Here’s an update on my space simulator: it now features procedurally generated planet textures for all exoplanets for which there is sufficient data to create such textures (some 3700 out of 4200 discovered exoplanets). More specifically, the data that I’m using to determine what an exoplanet might look like is its mass, radius, density and equilibrium temperature which is dependent on the type of star it orbits and how far out from the star it orbits. One thing to note is that the textures are not generated on the fly by a shader program, but were generated in advance with node.js (generating, for instance, 7 planet textures with a resolution of 2048 pixels in a shader would take toooooo long).
Stars are also procedural, but I can’t take much credit for those as I used the star shader developed for this project for the stars in my simulation. Credit goes to Ben, the developer of that project.
Anywho, some cool systems:
Proxima Centauri (closest star to Earth; has an Earth sized planet in its habitable zone).
Kepler-444 - Four tiny worlds that orbit very close to their host star. The inner three are likely dead atmosphere less worlds like our Moon and Mercury.
TRAPPIST-1 - system with seven worlds of which two are potentially habitable. A third world (f) orbits in the habitable zone but is likely an ocean world as its density is very low. It also has an icy world, h, and three terrestrial worlds that orbit inside of the stars habitable zone.
WASP-19 - a Jupiter sized world that orbits its star in only 19 hours (!).
If you are exocurious, here’s the Hall of Fame page.
Happy winter time!