April 1996, pastel and poster colour, 500 x 400 mm
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, Neptune probably had such bright rings like Saturn. The landscape on the foreground belongs to Triton, the biggest moon of Neptune; the surface primarily contains of nitrogen, methane and water ice. A great dark plume of smoke comes from below the surface and rises into the higher layers of the atmosphere, which is much thinner than ours. The very sharp and dark shadows are obvious. They are caused by the small size of the Sun's disk, 30 times farther than we see it from earth, and the fact that Triton's atmosphere reflects very little amounts of light. The starry sky is unknown to us, it has been completely changed in many thousands of years.
Copyright © Chris Dorreman