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Description
Interested in making something like this yourself? Check out my video tutorial on YouTube!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMK3Y…

This was a continuation of the same idea as my Island of the Milky Way . I take a celestial image and use it as the basis for a height map for a fictional land mass. This time, I wanted to make something a bit more recognizable than the Milky Way (which we never see in its entirety, so I used the Andromeda Galaxy image off its Wikipedia Page.

I found that I can actually tone down and eliminate a lot of the tiny stars with the despeckle filter, though that still left some of the larger stars in the image. I wanted to make a map of something with a plausible reason for existing, and my solution was volcanos. I did a bit of airbrushing to create volcanic craters in the center of each "star-mountain." The smaller hills can be explained as ash piles leftover from past eruptions and smaller vents. Some of the commenters on the Island of the Milky Way page had similar ideas. Great minds think alike!

I don't own the rights to the reference image (Check the Wiki site for the image's information), but you're free to use/modify the map on top for anything you like.

[edit: running with a suggestion made below, I made another map using a nebula as the base image. See it here .]

Description
Interested in making something like this yourself? Check out my video tutorial on YouTube!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uMK3Y…

This was a continuation of the same idea as my Island of the Milky Way . I take a celestial image and use it as the basis for a height map for a fictional land mass. This time, I wanted to make something a bit more recognizable than the Milky Way (which we never see in its entirety, so I used the Andromeda Galaxy image off its Wikipedia Page.

I found that I can actually tone down and eliminate a lot of the tiny stars with the despeckle filter, though that still left some of the larger stars in the image. I wanted to make a map of something with a plausible reason for existing, and my solution was volcanos. I did a bit of airbrushing to create volcanic craters in the center of each "star-mountain." The smaller hills can be explained as ash piles leftover from past eruptions and smaller vents. Some of the commenters on the Island of the Milky Way page had similar ideas. Great minds think alike!

I don't own the rights to the reference image (Check the Wiki site for the image's information), but you're free to use/modify the map on top for anything you like.

[edit: running with a suggestion made below, I made another map using a nebula as the base image. See it here .]