Jupiter Research & Experiment Round 1

After doing initial research on Jupiter and traditional visual fx on film, I was still unsure what Jupiter looked like since it was made mostly of metallic hydrogen, which has rarely ever been seen on earth by a few accidents. So I contacted a professor in chemistry, Beverly Clement, who gave me a fantastic poetic visual description of metallic hydrogen. I've posted her description below:

"This is the emission spectrum of hydrogen.  Without the aid of a prism or grating the color you see from ‘excited’ hydrogen is a blue with pink overtones – not a pigment effect but two clean simultaneously visible colors, one blue the other red so you get the impression of a blue that is almost blushing.  The indigo and violet lines darken the blue cast as an impression of these colors not a blending with the blue.

The pure liquid is supposed to be colorless, and as far as thickness or viscosity, it is a very light liquid without the ability to stick to other things.  It probably wouldn’t pick up many impurities.  The only way that hydrogen can exist as a liquid is either under extreme pressure or incredibly cold temperatures (roughly 20 degrees above absolute zero).  The slightest disturbance would provide sufficient energy for spectacular (explosive) vaporizations.  These vaporizations would possibly be visible as geysers of light energy coming from a seething surface.  Since there isn’t really any energy involved in holding the liquid hydrogen together, wave action would probably be sufficient to excite the hydrogen at the crests of any waves to possibly emit light of these emissions at the points of the waves and any sprays that might stream from these crests. This evaporation would probably also produce some solid hydrogen that would fall and implode on the surface of the liquid.  If solid hydrogen were to exist, it would probably glow (possibly a blue white).  While the term ‘metallic’ hydrogen brings to mind the metallic luster we associate with metals, hydrogen’s glow would only be of the excited hydrogen at the surface where the liquid and gas met or where the action of wind (possibly also made of pure hydrogen) exciting the surface of the ocean and painting its reverse Aurora Borealis on the surface.

 

Think of hydrogen as the ultimate gas that is only forced into liquid state under extreme conditions and anything (from gently falling cosmic dust to impact form space debris) will cause the liquid to vaporize – with the simultaneous release of light energy and formation of solid hydrogen."


 My Jupiter visualizations will be based off these descriptions.

Currently, my dividers for my water tank are drying with silicon on them. The silicon takes 24 hours to dry so they'll be ready to test tomorrow. 
Meanwhile, I had 2 other side projects going along, one with cotton and the other with paint. Here are the results with a Macro lens and different lighting set ups with the paint. The paint it suppose to demonstrate the colors of metallic hydrogen where it's a blue with blushing shades of red, but not pigmented and the colors are separated. I'm not entirely happy with the results, I'm thinking of sanding down the paint so it has more smooth look, or try some digital manipulating to smooth it out. I'm also going to use this paints in the water tank to see if the looks is better.

I'll be getting Christmas lights to put behind the cotton to demonstrate the light geysers of excited hydrogen. Once I have the tank tests going, I'll be experimenting using the cotton as a backdrop to the tank and as compositing.  But up close I feel the cotton is successful to give a gaseous look so I'm happy with the results.

Also, this past week I launched my website! www.cassandrahanks.com