Conamara Chaos

“Conamara Chaos” is the famous region on the surface of Europa which consists of large ice rafts which at some point were freely floating on the surface of the moon then later froze into place.  The area was imaged at high resolution by the Galileo spacecraft and is considered very strong evidence for a subsurface ocean below Europa's surface.  In this image I’m imagining this same area in 5 billion years as our Sun expands into a red giant and begins to melt the surface of Europa.  While preparing to do this image, I ran a few calculations and was shocked to find that if the Sun expands to its predicted 2 AU diameter, it will cover 22 degrees of the Europan sky, while Jupiter itself is only around 12 degrees!  I found the fact simply amazing that the red giant Sun, as seen from Europa, will be nearly twice the diameter of Jupiter.  And where is the Earth during all of this?  Most likely inside the Sun.

This is my first attempt at using Vue to render a terrascape scene.  I used Vue 11 to make up the ocean, ice rafts, Jupiter, and sky.  I used Photoshop to paint the red giant using custom brushes and assemble the final image.  Apophysis was used to generate fractal images for the Sun and clouds.  I also used Sienna’s Starry Night software to determine a true scene based on a Sun with a 2 AU diameter.