Test with galaxy tutorial

Removed thread hijack..

I too never knew that most galaxies had just a few arms until yesterday when i found this image and it gave me some inspiration to do some more experimenting.

I've gone back to the original image and reduced the twirl a little bit, increased the dark parts and butchered the rings, and now I think it's starting to look somewhat like a galaxy... these are really only the gas clouds at present.

I think that image looks a lot more realistic. Give it some glow and I think you're on the right track.

This is just my personal opinion on the matter, but I think you'll find that the closer spiral galaxies (i.e. the ones we have larger pictures of) are generally going to have more arms and be more tightly wound. This is because the further away the galaxy is (in general) the younger it is. Some of the furthest galaxies in the GalaxyZoo have not even wound themselves one time, while the closer galaxies like Andromeda and Triangulum (and the Milky Way) are more tightly wound and look to have more arms. (I think the multiplication of the arms is actually just the nominal two arms being split apart by gravitational forces as they wind around the core.) So having more than two arms is okay, but if you look closely at the Milky Way images, the minor arms just seem to be fragments.

Yes that's what I'm going for, two main arms and some arm fragments so I'm going to butcher the white areas even more.

With some star clusters added I think this will turn out quite good...

Thanks for the help!

I like it. I'd put some clouds around the arms, but not so much that they fill up all of the space, give it some color, and plop down lots of stars. Nice job there.

Another update. I've added the first cloud layer and the stars, added some colour as well. I think I'll add at least one or two cloud layers albeit less dense than this one. Next thing to do however is adding the core (the clouds at the center will be removed then...).

It feels like I'm on the right track at least :)

I think it's looking good so far.

Definitely on the right track.

Thats looking really good now.

I've finished adding dust, and I added some more stars to the arms and the Core. Next up is adding a "bar" to the core and placing some brighter stars.