I want also to thank NASA and USGS for the wonderful and free data made available in such a cool way. Please check out Daniel's astronomy photo-mosaics blog : my-favourite-universe.blogs pot.fr/ Whithout his help I doubt I would have been able to bring that realism in this picture. I'd like to publicly thank Daniel Macháček for his fundamental help in the making of this image, as he taught me how to use the NASA data sets in the best way available. Made with Blender and Gimp on Linux-Ubuntu. This image is entirely inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. The time at the surface is dusk, and several large cities are appearing in the dark.
So, we are in a travel cabin, descending along the cable of the space elevator, descending to Pavonis Mons (the central volcano on the image). The cable of the space elevator is also a 3D model. I first built a 3D model (in Blender) of the whole area thanks to NASA topographic data, set the correct light and then photo-manipulated it carefully in Gimp, adding layers of color map and high definition texture map, plus adding the many details. 'The Space Elevator to Mars - Descent At Dusk'Ībout 40 hours of work on this massive photomanipulation, made in super high definition.