EMAIL: d96rfr@csd.uu.se NAME: Robert Fremin TOPIC: Great engineering achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Socorro radiotelescope COUNTRY: Sweden WEBPAGE: http://www.csd.uu.se/~d96rfr/ RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.02 Win32 TOOLS USED: No tools used in scene building. Everything written in PovRay internal editor. Image post-processing (conversion & added text) and ground heightfield drawing, using Paint Shop Pro 4.12. RENDER TIME: ?h ?m with 800x600 adaptive AA level3 mode 2 HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The radiotelescope is perhaps the most important equipment of modern astronomers today. Because of this invention, the scientist have discovered new theories as "the big bang" and such when they were able to see further out in space (and therefore further back in time). The principle is that all molecules send out radiowaves that the antennas intercept, and is then visualized with computers. After a while, they discovered that many smaller antennas could be synchronized to work as a huge single antenna. This technique is called "aperture synthesis". In the desert of New Mexico, USA, outside the town Socorro lies one of the largest array of radiotelescopes in the world, called the VLA (the Very Large Array). The VLA consists of 27 antennas with a radius of about 25 meters. They are oriented in a Y-shaped pattern. This gives the VLA a total capacity equal to a 27 kilometer radius telescope! Of course the aperture technique can be used in a larger concept VLBI (Very Large Baseline Interferometry) where radioscopes all around the world are synchronized in a gigantic pattern.... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Written in PovRay for Win32. The heightfield was brushed out in PSP. I had one great photo of the angle used in my image, so I measured and calculated, and got this out of it. The antenna dish is a large CSG of spheres and planes, and with a corrugated outside with a story of it's own (see below). The framework around the antenna is hard vector and cylinder work. I duplicated and rotated one section of frame all around the antenna. The box is a set of triangle handmade faces. It took a while until I understood how all parts looked and fit together, for instance the bottom tripod used to be a quadpod until I found out the facts... :) The corrugations took a lot of time to make. First I used some spheres, scaled and rotated. HOWEVER I GOT SOME BUG! :( The backside of the antenna with corrugations got a large assymetric hole, where I could see through into the dish! Hmm, as I knew that I needed the pattern on the outside, I used cylinders instead. Same thing, large hole on the surface. So I decreased the number of cylinders, and after a couple of tries the hole disappeared (leaving me unhappy about the crude corrugation). :P The last weeks of February were used almost only for lighting and the landscape, which I am not pleased with at all. In the photo, there is a nice red morning glow over the picture, but when I tried to make the same, the image lost it's details. Sorry about that I didn't make the rails that the antennas should be mounted to, but I had only a few photos, and could not see quite how it should be made. (and I hadn't got the time) As the three parts of the antenna is separate CSG's the whole construction is prepared for animation sequences... -.,¸_¸,.-~^´¯`^~-.,¸_¸,.-~^´¯`^~-.,¸_¸,.-~^´¯`^~-.,¸_¸,.-~^´¯`^~-.,¸_¸,.-