View of Galactic Black Hole FinalView of Galactic Black Hole

The picture is intended to depict the view from a planet near the super massive Black Hole at the centre of our Galaxy. The fire planet in the sky is being broken up by the gravity and the planet of the viewpoint will soon follow. No need for us to worry about that particular Armageddon though as our Solar System is way out on the fringes of our Galaxy and so incredibly far away that however much the Black Hole grows its gravity will never be enough to draw us in even after billions of years.

This was done entirely photographically from my own images. No digital painting and no planet or star images from others.

4 main layers were used.

Landscape Image

First for the landscape I used a picture taken from the side of the Caldera Colorada volcano, near Masdache, Lanzarote. This image was taken during a series of Star Trail images but exposed a little earlier to get light on the landscape. The land was selected and pasted onto a new transparent image and various distortions used including, twirl, shear and transform to create the weird landscape.

The image below is the original landscape before processing

View of Galactic Black Hole LandscapeView of Galactic Black Hole

Stars Image

The Stars were taken from one 2 minute exposure of the stars and brightened with Topaz.  Then the stars were duplicated and multiplied by selecting, pasting into a new image, rotating and pasting back in areas of few stars. The clone tool was used to add more and cover joins. Then the distort twirl command was used for the rotation.A high setting was used of 659. Brightness contrast was used to brighten more.

The image below is the original star field

View of Galactic Black Hole StarsView of Galactic Black Hole

Fire Planet Image

The next image was the Fire Planet. This was taken from a picture I took of a rock on Lanzarote. This was cropped to square. Then the distort spherise command followed by colour balance and hue saturation. Brightness was increased.  One point I discovered after research was that to use the elliptical marquee tool to draw a perfect circle from the centre requires that the smallest part of the drawing has to be started before holding down the shift and alt keys to constrain to a circle. Holding down the shift and alt keys at the start doesn’t work

The image below is the rock image before edits.

View of Galactic Black Hole Fire PlanetView of Galactic Black Hole

Black Hole

The Black Hole was created by drawing a circle, filling with black and using layer styles, outer and inner glow to greate the light emitted at the Event Horizon. The gravity is so strong that once a star falls below the Event Horizon and is crushed, nothing even light can escape.

The star field was used as a base and selections of the landscape and fire planet pasted in. The image below is the final result.

View of Galactic Black Hole FinalView of Galactic Black Hole

Edwin Jones