"Gas Giant Moons" Series

1998, modeled in Bryce 2, composition in Adobe PhotoShop

  There are so many strange ways planets and moons can turn out, just with minor changes in size, orbiting distance, etc. Any one world, including Earth, could have turned out completely different - and there's no telling what kind of life could develop in a given environment. I find it's wonderful, and also a little humbling, to think about, sometimes...

  This series grew out of work I was involved in with the Hubble Space Telescope Project GO-8267: "Taking the Measure of Planets in the Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae." The idea was to observe the hundreds of thousands of stars in the cluster over a period of several days, in hopes of spotting transiting (eclipsing) planets. I became interested in the possibility of refining transit observations to the level of detail at which one may be able to spot light-curve variations caused by satellites orbiting those planets.

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