Every time I look at a massive nebula through my telescope (such as the Orion Nebula or the Rosette Nebula) I wonder what it might look like if a planet were to be found orbiting one of those massive blue-white supergiant stars embedded deep within them. I’m sure that if such a scene were ever to be seen by human eyes, the nebula would not look anything like this. The scientific side of me keeps saying that a nebula, while it looks pretty from a great distance, probably looks like nothing at all from up close. (Sort of like being able to see 10 to 15 feet ahead of you in a fog because from up close, it’s not all that dense, but from a distance it looks quite solid.) But it’s still nice to imagine a scene like this. This scene was created in Bryce 3D with just two objects: the planet object and the nebula. The nebula object is a large sphere surrounding the entire scene so that if the camera were rotated in a circle, it would see nebula everywhere. The star was created in Photoshop 5.0 using a plug-in called Knoll Lens Flair Pro from Puffin Designs. (Highly recommended — it gives you so much more control over the effect than the standard Photoshop filter.) The fact that the nebula is mapped onto a sphere is important because lately I have been playing with a piece of software called PhotoVista from Live Picture. This software enables you to create 360 degree environments through which the browser can move. The picture you see above is the first step in creating such a scene to place in this web site. Stay tuned for more updates!