Great graphics!
Your post is a great place to hang a plug for what I consider to be one of the coolest programs I've ever seen: Celestia
From the Celestia homepage:
Welcome to Celestia
... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.
Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.
At the Celestia Motherload site, you can download add-ons for more detailed planetary textures, real spacecraft like Voyager I and II with their current positions, and also a huge number of fictional spacecraft as well. Apparently some folks have lots of spare time on their hands. :-)
