Demo - Planetary Approach at 0.75c

I've been wanting to do some example-style work, and had motive and opportunity to do my first one.

The below is from Celestia and shows the result of an approach (and withdrawal and approach and ... ) at three quarters of the speed of light, or around 225,000 kilometers per second.   I used to play around with this sort of thing and it's become bleedingly obvious of late that other people haven't, and thus have no idea what this sort of thing should look like.

Direct download here

Another fun thing to do with Celestia?   Intentionally fly around at ludicrous speed and get lost.   Then try to find your way home.  Of course, I left the labels on, but if you go play at atlasoftheuniverse.com enough you start to get a good sense of what's where and, if you're like me, then with practice you can find your way home like five percent of the time.  ;-)

A few caveats . . . this video was made in a small window, so Celestia automatically adjusts the field of view accordingly.   So, it's only "really" valid at about 600 by 400.  But, it gets the general point across anyway.

One of my next demo videos, hopefully, is to show what ships actually look like when accelerating at 1g, 10g, 20g, 100g, 1000g, et cetera.    There are a lot of people who don't have a clue what that would look like, either.