Cold Summer

No story behind this one. I just wanted to try my hand at painting an atmosphere.

This is supposed to be Pluto and its moons some time around perihelion (closest approach to the Sun.). In ascending order, you have Pluto itself, Charon, Hydra, and finally Nix. Coincidentally, this is the warmest period in Pluto's year and bits of ices on its surface sublimate into a thin atmosphere.

Gold and Dust, The Singer, Kepler 78b

Pumping Station 8

Water is life on Aker. 

Gustav Crater, roughly 10 kilometers from the Proxima One base, is especially rich in it and supplies the thousands of gallons that Proxima One needs everyday for everything from agriculture to spacesuit cooling systems.

During a lull in the constant dust storms that ravage the planet's terminator, where day turns to night, technicians from the colony travel via rover to Pumping Station 8, which has been in dire need of maintenance for weeks. Luckily, with the arrival of the team of technicians, the potential disaster of its shutdown has been averted

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Nightingale (left) and its moon, Wellington.

 The only other planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, Nightingale, so named for the peculiar whistle-like noises produced by its radio emissions, is a run-of-the-mill gas planet, if small at only 80 times the mass of the Earth. It lingers at the very edge of its sun's gravitational sphere of influence, alone except for its single moon, Wellington.

Wellington, a roughly Earth-sized ball of ice and rock, is a near-double for our own Titan. Because of the tentative evidence found at Titan, Wellington has been the target of nearly every probe launched from Aker. Time will tell if the similarities between Titan and Wellington extend beyond climate...

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Kepler 78b

 Discovered just this year, this little, Earth-sized world whizzes around its sun in just over 8 hours, due to its 1/100th AU orbit. With a day-side temperature between 3680 and 5120 degrees Fahrenheit, Kepler 78b has been called a "lava-planet" by the astronomers who discovered it. It's been confirmed to glow in the visible spectrum

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This one doesn't really have anything to do with any of the others. It's just that its subject was featured in the news, and I thought it'd be interesting to do my own impression what this odd little planet might look like.

The motion blur effect is purely artistic license.

Baleful Sun

The Niña and Santa Maria as they insert themselves into orbit. The Pinta is out of frame.

Aker. 

Dry. Cold. Dusty. Dead.

Home to Mankind's farthest outspost: the Proxima One research station. Rivaled only by the terraformation of Mars in ambition and difficulty, this controversial project was initiated as much to accomplish its goal of studying the Centauri triplets from up close as it was simply because the people involved could. 

As much self-sufficient colony as it is a research outpost, Proxima One is home to almost 50 scientists and support personnel. As seen now, Proxima One is about to receive its first re-supply mission. 12 years in the coming, this small fleet, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, carries almost 100 tons total of seed, industrial and scientific equipment, spare parts, and small luxury items. Once their payloads are released into orbit to descend to the surface, they will have just enough fuel to make the 8 year trip back home, where they will be refurbished, refueled, re-loaded, and launched back to Proxima Centauri.

The planet itself orbits just at the outer edge of Proxima Centauri's habitable zone, whizzing around the star in just under 14 days. Combined with its 196 hour "day", this motion is just enough to generate a definite, if somewhat weak, magnetic field, protecting the planet, and its human inhabitants, from its sun's frequent, intense flare events.

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The backlighting is not purely artistic. It is a, I hope, scientifically accurate, or at least plausible, representation of the effect that Alpha Centauri's stars might have on objects orbiting Proxima.

Nova Mars

Nova Mars

A glimpse at a possible future. This Mars is in the beginning stages of terraforming. It's warmer than modern Mars. Wetter. There's even the beginnings of a thicker, oxygen rich atmosphere. But it's still bitterly cold and bone dry. Most of the new water is locked up in the giant ice sheets that now dominate the surface, unusable until such a time as the temperature is warm enough for liquid water.

Even now, this decreasingly, but still highly, hostile world supports a fledgling civilization; brave pioneers willing to risk everything to bring a dead world back to life.

This started life as a test of a method for creating realistic ice that someone [Ittiz] on deviantArt taught me, but it looked so nice that I was compelled to polish it up as a finished picture.

The starfield is courtesy of stock provided by this guy: [bloknayrb]

You can view a larger version of this piece here: [Link]