Well, the first paragraph could be fulfilled, crudely, with a window next to your desk. Unfortunately, this approach does not scale easily to address the additional specifications set forth in your second paragraph.
Alas, central Michigan is sadly lacking in mountains, and I don't think I could handle a commute from a house that had them.
But you have anticipated one aspect of this that I hadn't mentioned: I'd actually prefer to have this running not as my desktop background, but on a very large flat-panel monitor embedded in the wall and surrounded by a window frame. (I've been trying to figure out if there would be a reasonable way to incorporate one or more full-spectrum lamps at various positions behind the window frame as well.)
As an alternative to the camera capture approach, a decent rendering package and a skilled artist ought to be able to produce something similar at near photo-realistic quality. The advantage to that approach is that adding additional light sources calculated from any current arrangement of sun/planet/moons would be trivial, and could either be updated in real time if you didn't mind using up some processor, or pre-rendered in a variety of states and blended.
Yeah, that could actually be better in a lot of ways. I was hesitant to suggest that route because (A) I personally would not be capable of doing it justice (certainly not without a lot of training), while with photos I think I possibly could, and (B) I haven't kept up with rendering stuff well enough to know how close those packages come to capturing the full richness and detail of an actual photo and an actual place. I emphatically don't want this to look the slightest bit fake or idealized: I'm looking for an everyday pretty scene from real life that just happens to be set in a quirky solar system
( ... )
Actually, it occurs to me that the rendered approach has very nearly been done, in the PS3's new-ish animated themes. I've got one that's an African savannah with zebras going by, and I think it has a real-time day/night cycle to it. I wouldn't say it's *quite* photo-realistic, but it's definitely getting close. Of course, the PS3 has a pretty massive 3D-graphics-oriented processor that's mostly sitting idle when it's on menu screens.
I haven't seen any themes come across that are quite what you're looking for, but most of the pieces are there. There were a few for-pay themes that showed up to tie in with the new Star Trek movie that had slowly shifting planet/nebula scenes.
The straightforward way to do it would be (tediously) building a 3D scene with a modeler, and then using something like OpenGL to light it.
You could probably cheat by lighting a scale model (or a real scene with a very bright light) with various colors of light, and then interpolating the lights.
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LOL
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But you have anticipated one aspect of this that I hadn't mentioned: I'd actually prefer to have this running not as my desktop background, but on a very large flat-panel monitor embedded in the wall and surrounded by a window frame. (I've been trying to figure out if there would be a reasonable way to incorporate one or more full-spectrum lamps at various positions behind the window frame as well.)
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I haven't seen any themes come across that are quite what you're looking for, but most of the pieces are there. There were a few for-pay themes that showed up to tie in with the new Star Trek movie that had slowly shifting planet/nebula scenes.
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You could probably cheat by lighting a scale model (or a real scene with a very bright light) with various colors of light, and then interpolating the lights.
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