This 360° wrap-around starscape replacement shows the stars as they would appear in the Tau Ceti system on July 3, 2794 at 0839 UTC, as well as a few local objects likely to be visible.

The stars, colony, and positions of planets have been rendered by Celestia, the open-source universe explorer. Using data on the planets known to be orbiting Tau Ceti, I made a few tweaks within real parameters to make things more comfy for our Martian colonists.

Remember the pink-brown planet from the Pfhor chapter screen? It's now an ice giant around which the colony orbits. Or is it a water giant? Celestia says it's 40F up there. Whatever, it's like Uranus, execpt smaller, warmer, and not sideways.

The huge blue planet is the colony moon, 1300 km below. I tried to put the Marathon in as high an orbit as possible while still being close enough to be an easily reached space station.

You can easily find Sol in the screen shot from G4 Sunbathing. It's just above and to the left of the right gantryway, or just below and to the right of Arcturus, slightly brighter than the surrounding stars.

On Marathon levels, your point of view will be from the Marathon's surface. The Scoutship will be part of the backdrop, while the scenery item is replaced by the unused slave transport sprite. On Pfhor levels, you view from an alien ship surface, and the Marathon sprite has been enhanced.

Software used: 1 - Gravitation to find a stable orbit for the moon, 2 - Celestia to produce renders, 3 -Hugin to stitch them together into a panorama, 4 - GIMP for postprocessing and Marathon's surface texturing.

To install, please drop the zip file into your appropriate plugins folder. Also, make sure that in Preferences > Graphics > Rendering Options, that "Replacement Texture Quality" for Landscapes is set to "Unlimited."

-New landscape for Pfhor levels -Corrected star orientation on Pfhor levels -Removed floating Marathon logo -Restored & enhanced Marathon sprite -Shortened plugin UI name -Fixed Windows compatibility (I hope)