The Ghosts of Europa

Every so often I like to choose an actual location and render a scene that you could see with your own eyes if you could manage to get there.  This is my rendition of Jupiter as seen from the surface of Europa.  Europa is slightly smaller than our own moon and is one of the smoothest bodies in the Solar System due to the lack of large-scale features such as mountains or  large craters.  More interesting is Europa's frozen crust of water ice which covers a liquid ocean estimated to be as much as 100 km thick.  A subsurface ocean of this depth would give Europa between two or three times as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined.  However, the surface is frozen solid and tidal flexing caused by Jupiter has fractured Europa's crust into long lineae (cracks) where the Hubble Space Telescope has detected plumes of water vapor.  Although not yet imaged, current data suggests this water vapor is the result of active geysers which are erupting as much as 7000 kg/s of water.

This scene depicts the magnificent view of Jupiter hovering over a line of cryovolcanoes erupting water vapor from a fracture in Europa's surface.  From this location, Jupiter would cover over 12 degrees of the sky and Io would appear a little larger than our own moon here on Earth.  I used Vue 2015 to render Europa's surface and Photoshop for Jupiter, Io, the geysers, and the atmosphere.  The texture for Jupiter is from NASA's OPAL Program. The images for the map were recorded on 19 January 2015.  This is a bit of a dark image but I think it looks haunting on a good monitor and in a dark room...