Adam Makarenko

I am pretending that this planet weighs a lot… This is my best acting work.

By December 2018 I had made about 1000 exoplanets, but only photographed 600…

Making cyclones and hurricanes for a water world planet Kepler 22b

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bqc7xBIAzIQ/

Experimenting with different castings for this exomoon

Iron filled, and then bathed in acetic acid

This is a version of Ultima Thule I was visualizing. In the end it looks quite different, but it was fun to try to imagine what it would look like.

This is a version of Ultima Thule I was visualizing. In the end it looks quite different, but it was fun to try to imagine what it would look like.

Here is a link to the real version imaged by New Horizon: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/ultima-thule-1-ca06_022219.png

Melting bismuth to make a planet
544.7 K ​(271.5 °C, ​520.7 °F)

I made these craters for a view from a hypothetical moon orbiting HD 179079b. They were hard to make, because I wanted to show repeated impacts over millions of years. I had to layer them in, and also give them a slight bit of texture. A larger scale project like this would be interesting.

Shown here is HD 179079b as seen from a hypothetical rocky moon that is orbiting the planet. Discovered in 2009 using Keck Observatory’s HIRES instrument, HD 179079b is classified as a ‘hot Neptune.’ It’s similar to our Solar System’s blue planet – about twice the mass of Neptune – but its weather is the polar opposite of Neptune’s icy cold conditions. HD 179079b’s equilibrium temperature is at a scorching 1,400 degrees Farenheit – hot enough to burn your bones to ash! This is because the planet orbits its parent star, HD 179079, very closely – just one fourth the distance between Mercury and our Sun. HD 179079b appears to be an only child; it is the only known planet orbiting this star, which is much older than our Sun. HD 179079 is 7 billion years old whereas the Sun’s age is 4.5 billion years. HD 179079 is a sub-giant star. In star years, this phase is between adulthood (Main Sequence phase) and retirement age (Red Giant phase). This entire system is located 207 light years away from Earth in the constellation Aquila. Scene inspired by scientific data published on Valenti et al. (2009), ApJ, 702, 989.

1. Black card used for control of the light. 2. white card used to bounce the light 3. A mask I made for an eclipse idea 4. Elliptic rings to see where shadows fall. 5. A sponge to wipe, and smear an incredible product that reduces glare called ‘Nano Blur’ 6. Flashlight for interior glows. 7. A helping hand for holding the planet in place 8. 750 spigot for a base to sit planets, or rocks on. 9. sandpaper for smoothing out planet surfaces before I apply a shellac.

experimenting with various substances to create this look/casting