Creation of the planets

So, I worked on the 3D modeling of planets and moons all day and finally got where I think I need to be.  I ended up modeling all 8 planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  I found out after many tries that using a logarithmic scale is trickier than I thought.  It is fine for the Terrestrial Planets, because they are small to begin with and spread out easily.  However, the Jovian Planets turned out to be much more difficult to fit into a log scale.  Because of their great distance from the sun, a log scale really squashes them together.  This was mainly because each of the gas giants has a ring system that extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers out past the planets equator, and then there are moons beyond that.  Also, I did decided to limit myself to only moons of 1000 km in diameter in size or larger, which eliminated Ceres as an option, and also some of the more well known moons, such as Mars' Deimos and Phobos.  But in all, I ended up modeling 15 natural satellites including Earth's Moon, and the largest moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  If I do eventually add dwarf planets, then Pluto, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, and Pluto's Moon Charon should be added as well.  This might make the orrery arms to long and mechanically unstable, though.

Also, I got through the challenge of making planet rings for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  It turns out that thanks to the Cassini Orbiter, there are really detailed high resolution NASA surface maps for all of Saturn's moons and the ring system.  The four Galilean moons of Jupiter also have pretty nice surface maps due to the Voyager 1 flyby.  Uranus and Neptune did not have as detailed surface maps or ring maps, and I found myself creating them from the few images on Wikipedia.  I ended up using Paint Shop Pro to convert spherical photos into rectangular surfaces.  So you may notice some of these maps are incomplete, or not precisely accurate.

In all, 8 planets and 15 moons was plenty of modeling, considering I had to calculate accurate logarithmic distances from the sun (I used perihelion), radii, satellite orbit distances, etc.  I'll post some pics of these planets and moons tonight.  The next step is to start modeling their elliptical orbits around the sun, and to figure out where gearing needs to be.