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"Blessed State" is my enduring favorite image. It came about quite by accident, when I was first starting to try to place a moon in the sky behind a landscape. I took my terrain generation program over to another computer, never thinking that the random number generator would be different there. I expected to get the mountains you see in "Lethe" and other images; instead I got these. I hadn't scaled the moon down to a reasonable size yet, and the lighting was just right to make a magnificent visual composition. It took me very little time to finish the image. I has appeared in National Geographic (June 1989) and on the inside cover of the second edition of Foley, van Dam, Feiner & Hughes' "Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice" and in many other books and periodicals.
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I always wondered what "Blessed State" would look like with a huge Saturnian planet looming behind it. Here it is. I'm not so sure that I should have done this to "Blessed State"...
Last Change: January 4 1995