Relativistic Picture Gallery
These are some pictures generated by WARP - because the speeds
at which colours start changing are substantially less than the speeds
at which gross geometric distortion occurs, some of these use
false colour to reduce the doppler shift.
Images of a City
These show a city being traversed at high speed. Points to look for are
the curving faces of buildings, and the way they appear to stretch. Also
note the blue shifting of both the gray buildings and the green trees.
Other points to notice are that in reality, the entire visable spectrum of
the city would be shifted into ultraviolet - hence for this picture the
doppler effects have been reduced to only 10% of their 'real' value - and
even so distant parts of the city are blueshifted to such an extent it
is difficult to see the sculpture.
The City at Rest
City approaching at 0.9c - false colour: doppler shift 10%
Warbird in Flight
These show a spaceship moving at relativistic speeds - no false colouration
is used, so much of the spaceship is blue or red shifted into black (since
it is modelled as having little reflectance in ultra-violet or infra-red).
Things to note are
- The colour gradiations : due to the ship moving transversely across
our field of view, the 'head' is receeding slightly while the body is still
approaching.
- The geometric distortion - the ship looks deformed due to the 'Terrell
Effect' (apparent rotation and shearing caused by light reaching the
observer from different parts of the ship at different times).
A stationary Romulan Warbird
Warbird travelling at 0.75c
If you liked these pictures...
- You can grab the source (requires a Silicon
Graphics machine with the the SGI 'GL' ('Graphics Library') installed)
- A quick explanation of how 'WARP' works.
- A quick explanation of the colour model
works.
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