There were some comments about my rather boring star background last time. I could point out that in the glare of a bright planet, you'd hardly see any stars at all. But where's the fun in that. It's art, after all. So in this image, I did some Photoshop for the star background, using Ron's Flames and Smoke brushes for the nebula effect, and then added lens flares for two bright stars. Plus another flare to the artifact. Planets, ship, little spacemen and artifact all rendered in Bryce. Thanks for viewing, commenting and favoriting. --- You'd think an artifact at Ganymede's North Pole would be obvious, but when the first orbital probes photographed the area, it was in shadow. There was a glint of something infrared, but it was dismissed as an imaging artifact, not a real one. The Third Jupiter Expedition landed on Ganymede in 2039, but in the equatorial zones, and the North Pole was again in shadow. It wasn't until the Japanese mission of in 2043 that the Artifact was noticed, glinting under a drawn-out sunset. With barely enough fuel for a polar landing, the two Japanese astronauts, Shima and Hara, could do little but record the inscriptions on the artifact's cylindrical base platform and make a failed attempt to scrape a few samples before they returned to their lander and hurried back to orbit. It wasn't until six years later, the after the next dawn over Ganymede's North Pole that the Archimedes arrived and Commander John Tate took one of his lander's down to the pole. As the previous expedition had recorded, the base of the oddly shaped twelve-sided monument was inscribed in five distinct scripts. It was a veritable Rosetta stone, had any one of those languages been decipherable. Tate discovered that the crystalline structure that had defeated the Japanese instruments was diamond and that the artifact's base was a gold-nanocarbon amalgam nearly as strong as the crystal. It was nearly impossible to date the artifact itself, but by looking at micrometeorite damage from the disturbed soil around the base, it had erected, or last been excavate, anyway, about fifty thousand years prior. Tate's best guess was that the Artifact was a survey marker, a hypothesis borne out by the discovery of similar markers at the North Poles of Londo around Alpha Centauri and on Gram, the largest moon of Siegfried in the Tau Ceti system. But those discoveries were a century in the future. It was another century beyond that before the Alimeen revealed that the markers were in fact survey monuments from the Grand Federation of Races, far to coreward. We still don't know exactly what the inscriptions mean. --Norton's Guide to Ganymede: A Tourist's Handbook, Norton Press, 2512