Space Software for the adventurer in all of us - 3D star maps, multiple sky views, and more
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The Story Behind this
3D Software

Stars in the NeighborHood

A Passion for Adventure

A lifetime obsession stands behind this software.  In a way, it has been decades in the making.

I consider myself lucky.  I grew up in a family surrounded by talk of other worlds, science fiction, space travel, and ancient civilizations.  My imagination was fired up with the likes of "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and "Forbidden Planet" — groundbreaking science fiction films of the early and mid-1950's.

Early in my career, I turned to art — creating worlds on canvas to scratch an itch that could never quite be satisfied.  I had one-man shows of my work.  I even had some of it used as background art in a short science fiction film by Saul Bass, based on a Ray Bradbury story — called "Quest."

Calculating the Heavens

While early in my art career, I happened to own one of the first programmable, handheld calculators.  With it, the itch grew stronger — to feel the space between the stars — to know the lay of the land in our neck of the galaxy.  From information I had gathered at Lowell Observatory (Flagstaff, Arizona), I proceeded to create distance tables for our neighboring star systems.  I needed to know how close they were to each other.  I wanted to discover if there were any adjacent islands in the dark of space — any archipelagos for easy planet-hopping.

"What's this about the stars being close?" you might ask.  When you know a terrain intimately, the distances no longer seem that great.  With my head in the stars, the entire Solar neighborhood seemed close.  The problem with the calculations, though, was that you could program only fifty steps or commands into the calculator at a time.  I ended up calculating half my problem, writing down interim results, then programming the last half of the problem, in order to get the final answers.  Needless to say, this was painfully time consuming.

Computer Art

But I needed more than distance tables to satisfy my yearning.  When finally I acquired my first PC (an Osborne "portable" using the CP/M operating system, I thought I had arrived in heaven.  I soon realized, though, that all the hype about graphics was little more than that.  Pictures made of letters of the alphabet were not what I had in mind.  With only moderate success, I created my own character set to simulate single pixel stars, but the vibrant green on black and tiny four inch screen were too painful for the artist in me.

Two years later, I had what I thought was a real computer.  A Tandy 1000 with 16-colors.  I programmed some 3D star fields, and modest steering capability, but the colors were sorely lacking.  More than anything, I wanted orange.  Yellow and red weren't enough for my star palette.  Again, I poked around at the machine level (assembly language) and created orange by flipping between the red and yellow.  At last!  But this came with a new set of problems.  The slow refresh rate of the screen image caused a noticeable blink that gave me a headache.  But I wasn't giving up on my quest — a way to make the adventure come to life.

Carl Martin
Carl Martin
Founder of Tharsis Highlands

"Tharsis Highlands is about adventure.  I've long wanted to create my own 3D star chart — a tool one might use in exploring the star systems near our own.

"'Stars in the NeighborHood' is just such a chart, and much, much more."

What's in a name?
... and a trademark logo?
 
When the first topographic maps of Mars came out in the 1970's, one feature stood out more than the super volcano, Olympus Mons, or the Grand Canyon of Mars, Valles Marineris — it was the great stretch of highlands centered on the Tharsis region.  Three other massive volcanoes dominated that high plateau, and the region became the namesake of this company — Tharsis Highlands.

Tharsis Highlands logo

Tharsis Highlands animated logo

The Mars globe and pyramid logo (the company's graphic trademark) is a modification of the ancient symbol for Mars, and represents the spirit of adventure in space travel, combined with the longing to discover ancient civilizations out amongst the stars (friendly ones, of course).

Blastoff to the Neighborhood

In the 1990's, my career changed from art and graphics to that of computers and programming. And, with the advent of VGA computer graphics cards and the Visual Basic programming language, I now had tools that would help sooth the itch, or so I thought. When finally I had the opportunity to program the first version of "Stars in the NeighborHood," I found that the itch had grown only stronger.
 
It's a big universe out there, and the more I learned about it, the more I wanted to explore those stars that have, for the longest time, seemed so close. And I created Tharsis Highlands to help explore that universe, through science, art, and software.  I hope you'll share the adventure with me.  Check out "Stars in the NeighborHood."  I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how much you can learn about our Solar neighborhood.
 
For more information about the
founder of Tharsis Highlands, go to www.carlmartin.net.

Tharsis Highlands Software