I wanted to try a new background for my little laptop, so here is another 1366X768 image. The starscape is from the ESO picture of the Milky Way at Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ESO_-_Milky_Way.jpg I mirrored the picture, then made a 100,000 X 100,000 X 100,000 hollow sphere and applied the material to it. Instant star dome! Then I put my BattleStar asteroid exile ship in it, kicked off the blast shield from the Orion drive and fired up the Ramscoop. I made the radiators and the scoop glow slightly red (ambience), the added a blue light out the back and a reddish light inside the nozzle. But no more lights. It's real dark out there between the stars (well, there should be some "starlight" but for this purpose, rather than put up tons of radial lights, I decided that the fusion flame is bright enough to drown it out...) The thumb got a kick to brightness and contrast, but I left the main image as rendered by Bryce. Thanks for viewing and any comments you might have! --- One hundred and eight years. That's how long the crossing took. They spent most of the time in chilled hibernation, aging at only one thirtieth normal. But that didn't mean they aged just a little more than three years in the crossing. No, that slumbering interval they hardly noticed. It was the time in between that gnawed at their mind. The sleep was no good for more than four months subjective -- not if you wanted any muscle or bone mass to survive. So every ten years of real time, they awoke, spent six months recovering and doing maintenance aboard the ship. Then they slept again, repeating the cycle nine or ten times until they came to Tau Ceti. Nearly a decade of aging on the body was almost nothing compared to the five or six years spent in the darkened void, staring at stars so far away to make them feel like insignificant specs on the face of the universe. It was a wonder more of them didn't go mad. -- Richard Hakluyt, The Sublight Age, Markham Press, 2752