I've been playing around the last few days with trying to find a new desktop background. I finally settled on one I really like and I've posted it below. I'm curious as to what UMSF-related background people are using.

Click to view attachment

This is the JPEG compressed version. If anyone would like the png version, let me know.

EDIT: Updated image.

This week, I am mostly using this background on my desktop...

Click to view attachment

... an image I made to illustrate a piece I wrote for my local paper describing the sights people can see in the sky above Kendal in June (Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury and the ISS)

Here's mine. Its an IR false color MASTER image from near Lake Mead.


Click to view attachment

I am currently using the image Exploitcorporations posted here.

I have around 40 space related desktop backgrounds that refresh once an hour and also double up as screen savers when my machine has been idle. I use a free download of software from Webshots , :

http://www.webshots.com/

Once downloaded, you can drag and drop your fave images into the folder to be included in your desktop background collection.

Many of my current collection have come from the fine work produced by the many artists using and contributing to this fine forum.

Cheers

Brian

I've got the saturn back-lit image at work.
A picture taken by Piers Sellers of the UK on my Macbook
And one of my composites of Earth from the Galileo E2 flypast on my PC at home.

Doug

Currently I have this one :
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images...s116e05983.html

But... I usually have something more UMSF-related.

Volcanopele, I like your desktop background but I would have preferred the same with a dead valley (without moss and grass).

I've got as my desktop (at the moment) a rarely-published section of a panorama taken by Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969:

Click to view attachment

This pan includes the only decent image of Neil Armstrong taken from the lunar surface -- Neil is working on someting at the MESA table.

The pan is rarely seen because of the sun flare, which someone (our very own Ian R, if I recall correctly) did a very good job of artistically dealing with on this particular reproduction.

-the other Doug

This is great for the PC but no Mac version exists - but the OSX Desktop Preference Pane will let you set any folder of pictures as a set of desktop backgrounds. You can then set the same folder for your screen saver with the "Ken Burns Effect."
Click to view attachment
The Cosmos screensaver includes some neat pictures that have been tweaked to be purty; you can pillage those images by following the directions here - this one is a favorite of mine from that:
Click to view attachment

One last cross platform tidbit about desktops - typically Mac users have their icons on the right of the screen, Windows on the left. I like to keep the busy bits of the picture away from the icons for clarity, so the same pic might not be the best for both machines.... or else just flip it.

I was using the New Horizons shot of Europa setting behind Jupiter until recently.

Click to view attachment

At present however I'm using a Don Davis picture of Pioneer 10, I've always felt a strange attachment to that probe...

Click to view attachment

Don Davis has a website where he hosts his public domain pictures several of which are UMSF related images.

Yeah -- one of the problems I have with a majority of the space-themed desktop images out there is that the left side of the screen (where my icons are located on this Windows XP machine) is too busy and cluttered. My favorite desktops are those which feature a lot of black sky in the upper left portion of the image. Hence my predilection for lunar and deep-space scenes.

-the other Doug

I tried to pick a foreground whose geology matched what one would expect on Io, in this case the fissure of a large flood basalt eruption. Play around enough with curves in Photoshop and you can make the moss look like sulfur. I used the patch tool to remove some of the most obvious blades of grass.

I use EC's colorized Io/Europa pic for one of my work PCs, a zoom into the Dancing Monkey from Titan for the other, and a color panorama from Spirit for my home PC. I regularly change the desktops, but keep the images in the screensaver folder. I'll have to checkout that Webshots program, looks like it's just what I've been looking for to cycle backgrounds and screensavers.

Had a MER desktop since Victoria crater

Too cool, oD; I horked it, ay!