One Small Step

"That's just one small step for a man," said Man as he set foot on new soil. And he looked around, and caught a glimpse of paradise.

A distant blue marble in the velvet darkness.

"Homesick yet?" said God.

When talking about man's place in nature, not only can you ask what man's place is, but also where.

The latter seems rather easy to witness from a vantage point far from it - and this perspective may also give some clues about to the former.

You're evidently far from home when you're just one small step from Tranquility Base - but a giant leap from Mankind.

Apollo lunar module and astronaut are Wings3D models; lunar soil is a height field, based on altitude data from the moon's north pole (edited in Photoshop), and makes quite some use of normal bumps.

Earth clouds & oceans are defined using a pigment pattern, based on NASA "blue marble" cloud density data; atmosphere is simulated with a mostly transparent slope-pattern texture oriented towards the camera; radiosity had to be turned off for the earth, as it is not really that far.

Some slight focal blur is used both to enhance the feeling of realism, and literally focus on the earth. Photoshop postprocessing is limited to adding the signature, converting to jpg format - and doing a last-minute horizontal flip of the image composition.

And no, you wouldn't see stars up there in such a scene.