Lunar Orbit Map of Campaign World

This map is for a Shadow World campaign I'm currently planning. It's done in CC3 with some GIMP editing of the planet Kulthea. Shadow World is a fantasy world but since the map is of the planet and its moons, I thought it would be more relevant in this section than in the fantasy section.

The planet of Kulthea itself is someone else's work. He's kindly given me permission to use it. All I did with his render was edit it in GIMP to turn it into a CC3 friendly PNG.

The background was downloaded from NASA and I played around with the colouring in InfranView until I found one that I felt worked with the map.

The sun and moons are symbols from CC3's Star Systems Annual. There's an additional background from the Annual behind the NASA one, but, when I tried getting rid of it the sheet effects of the map got lost, so it's there but not visible.

Comments and or suggestions greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Rob

EDIT: Sorry, the background is actually two images from NASA blended together.

I love it. Only problem I see is that it gets pretty pixelated at full zoom.

Yup have to agree with Nolgroth, very nice but very pixellated at full-res.

Thanks nolgroth and Steel General.

I noticed the pixellation after posting the map, but it was lateish at night and time for sleep.

I had resized it from a smaller 600x600 map. There's still pixellation in that one too though. There's something going on in the background from all the playing around with the settings that I did while drawing it. Of course the fact that I was blindly playing around without any thought to scales, effects or final appearance would have nothing to do with that now would it?;)

I'm going to keep plugging at it--with the knowledge of how I'd like to the finished product to appear--with some additional cosmetic improvements.

I'm all for that. Looking forward to seeing how this comes out in the end.

Okay, here's version 2.0

Changes:
1. Only used one background image from NASA.

2. Substituted another render for the central planet. Again, not my work--but kindly used by permission. Also made sure to make a really clean edit this time.


3. Moved the sun to upper left as I have a use in mind for the lower area of
the map.

4. Got rid of the drop shadows. I didn't really like how they looked anyway.

What's planned:
1. Rather than have the orbital periods and distances written accross the
elipses, I think I'm going to summarize them in the lower portion of the
portion of the map. This will also allow me to provide more information
about each moon.

I'm still undecided about putting the full names next to each stellar body. I think it'll look "cleaner" if I just give them a key number--linked to the bottom area of the map.

I think I'll do something with the texture on the central planet. I definitely have fix up the shadowing on it a bit.

Again, comments and suggestions greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Rob

PS: Astute observers may notice the slight green shift of the surrounding stars. This is due to a misaligned lens in the adamantine sensor probe. Realignment will take about oh--1 million years. In the meantime, working on a software workaround.

So what I'm seeing is an earth-like planet with three moons, one of which has it's own moon as well. Pretty cool. Awesome nebula image. Planets look good too except one minor thing...the shadows all come from the top left instead of aligning up properly to the sun so a small rotate will fix that. So far so good.

Now that is an awesomely cool map.

Um, did you calculate the orbital periods?

That's the Orion nebula ... my fave.

Yes, it's a very cool image!