To use these Startups rename them StartupScreen (one word) and place them in your system folder. Or you can use the handy program StartupFrills and designate the Astronomy Startups folder as your StartupScreen folder and it will copy and rename a new StartupScreen every startup.
I created these three startupscreens for my PowerMac 7200/90. All three are at 832x624 resolution and look bad without 16 bit graphics. (Thousands of Colors)
Venus Startup II is simliar to the Venus Startup already at Info-Mac. I took a NASA/JPL GIF of the Venetian surface (found on a BBS under the name venus1.gif) created electronically from data collected by the Magelllen spacecraft. Using GraphicConverter, I enlarged the graphic and added a black area at the top. I then pasted in the words "Welcome to Planet Macintosh" using Debump and Clarisworks, copying in the Anti-aliased words one at a time.
Eclipse I is a 256 grayscale image of an total eclipse of the Sun. I took the center 832x624 pixels of the original 2000x1345 pixel NASA image hao_WLCC_941103.jpg (sorry, lost the URL) and used GIF Converter to change to color palette to "Standard 256 grays." With 16 bit color and the original pallete the graphic looked remarkably terrible. It looked best when I switched my monitor depth to 256 grays, and viewed it in its original pallette, but that couldn't be recreated in 16 bit depth somehow. Changing the pallette introduced dithering into the formally solid center, so I used the filled circle in GraphicConverter to "re-eclipse" the image, and the image is faithful to the original color map.
Eclipse II is the entire hao_WLCC_941103.jpg image with the height reduced to 624 pixels, and the remainder reduced proportionally. The middle 832 of the remaining pixels were selected, to create a 832x624 graphic. Again, I used GIF Converter to change to color map to "Standard 256 Grays" and used GraphicConverter to remove the undesireable dithering from the center of the sun.
I created these startups for my own use, as I had a new high-res PowerMac, and my old 640x480 startups just didn't cut it. I hope you find them as awe-inspiring as I do, and maybe you will become just a bit more interested in Astronomy.
If you like the graphics, I would like to hear from you, email me at mhuerta@tenet.edu and I am sure to respond. I have just graduated from high school, and will major in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin.
