TITLE: The Valles Marineris Wilderness
NAME: Bob Franke
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bfranke2@home.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/bob_franke/pov/pov.htm
TOPIC: The Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mars.jpg
ZIPFILE: mars.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows 95/98/NT


TOOLS USED: 

Richard Horne's 3DEM, Lview Pro for jpeg, 
Borland's Delphi to create the heightfield, Lview 
for JPEG conversion and copyright and the POV editor


RENDER TIME: 

26 seconds (how embarrassing)


HARDWARE USED: 

generic Pentium-III 450 w/ 256 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

In the image we are on Mars, in the east end of the 
Valles Marineris at 13.12 deg S, 65.0 deg west looking 
to the west.

Valles Marineris, or Mariner Valley, is a vast canyon 
system that runs along the Martian equator just east of 
the Tharsis region.  Valles Marineris is 4000km (2500 mi) 
long and reaches depths of up to 7 km (4 mi).  For 
comparison, the Grand Canyon in Arizona is about 800 km 
(500 mi) long and 1.6 km (1 mi) deep.  In fact, the 
extent of Valles Marineris is as long as the United States 
and it spans about 20 percent (1/5) of the entire distance 
around Mars. The canyon extends from the Noctis Labyrinthus 
region in the west to the chaotic terrain in the east.  Most 
researchers agree that Valles Marineris is a large tectonic 
"crack" in the Martian crust, forming as the planet cooled, 
affected by the rising crust in the Tharsis region to the 
west, and subsequently widened by erosion forces.  However, 
near the eastern flanks of the rift there appear to be 
some channels that may have been formed by water.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I used Richard Horne's 3DEM program to load the NASA Mars 
Viking Orbiter digital terrain model (DTM) files for the 
east end of the Valles Marineris canyon system and exported 
the data to a standard Terrain Matrix file. I then wrote a 
program to convert the elevation data to a 16-bit TGA file, 
to use as a heightfield.  When I get time I will add this
function to my wDem2Tga program, on my POV web site.  The 
ground and sky colors are based on true color images from 
the NASA Mars Pathfinder data.

For a copy of 3DEM see url http://www.microtopo.com

For the record:
To make image more interesting, I have stretched the data 
vertically. (just like NASA)