I was surprised when I saw how good this turned out. It goes right up there with my castle hallway on my list of favourites. I worked on it on a Friday night and a Saturday afternoon, having nothing better to do. It took about three hours to render, but it was at low priority while I did other things.

POV-Ray reported that the final image contained 15802 objects! Well, there's a lot of little struts and things in it - notably the frameworks on top of the dish and the cage supporting it. Most of this was done with loops. I think these details are what make it look good. I was working from actual photos of radio telescopes, and the picture was inspired by the famous VLA (Very Large Array).

I used a few tricks here. The fog serves a dual purpose: It looks good, and it obscures the very bad ground texture, the low-detail bases on the sattelite dishes, and the transistion between the mountains and the flat ground. The sky is one of the included sky spheres from POV-Ray. The mountains are there mostly to get rid of the infinite plane effect, but they look good too. I made them with gforge and then used PhotoPaint to flatten them off: by fading one end of the bitmap to solid black, I forced the edge of the mountain range to merge into a flat landscape. Finally, the sky is an area light, giving the soft shadows. This really improves the shading inside the curved dishes.

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