I haven't posted an image in, like, forever. Work mostly, plus a short story to finish. And then I got Bryce 6.3 and then that 93% off giant pack of stuff from DAZ: 181 files to download and install. Took a while to do that. But I thought I'd get in one more image before the end of the year. Nothing too complicated but I needed a 1366X768 background to go with my new $500 Lenovo laptop (not too fancy, but it runs Windows 7 and stuff well on 3GB RAM and a 250GB hard disk). This image is actually inspired by something I saw on the back of a book cover (the flattened gas giant and moons, plus the landscape, though I added the monolith and subtracted the space monkeys...) All (but the signature - obsolete in a couple of hours) done with Bryce 6.3. Haven't really stressed the program yet, so can't say whether it improves on 6.1 Happy New Year! And may 2010 be better than 2009! --- Between sixty and forty thousand years ago the Founders placed survey markers at the north pole of largest planet of every system they visited. When that planet a gas giant, they placed the marker on the largest moon. That's where we found our first alien artifact, a marker at Ganymede's north pole. Now, from what few records we have, we've determined that the Founders and their allies never made it much further rimward than our solar system. So it was a surprise to find a marker on the north pole of the largest moon of the gas giant we've named Allegra. The name comes from its four hour day, a fast spin that gives it a flattened appearance and a magnetic field stronger than any known world so far from its sun. The marker at Allegra Prime was not some elaborate polygonal structure with intricate script in multiple languages. It was a simple seven meter tall block of stone etched with crude luminous symbols. A poor imitation of the great Founders, we thought. But this monolith turns out to be a granite stone carved over three million years ago. There is no granite in this entire lifeless system. And the blue glow from those crude symbols comes from bioluminescent organisms that have survived for ages in that harsh environment. So who was imitating who, I start to wonder. -- Grace Mattock, Chief Scientist, Second Orion Deep Survey, 2284-2287