Phobos Lithophane Lamp

Phobos LithophaneI'm very proud to present what is likely the first non-spherical planetary lithophane lamp, representing the Martian moon Phobos.Most existing lithophane lamps, including my Solar System lithophane series, are based on simple geometric primitives such as spheres or cylinders. In these cases, mapping greyscale image values to surface thickness is straightforward: vertex coordinates [X, Y, Z] are converted into spherical coordinates [θ, ϕ, r], and the image brightness directly modulates the radius r.Phobos, however, is highly irregular, rendering this approach unsuitable. To generate its lithophane, I used the high-resolution Phobos shape model by Ernst et al. (2023, Earth, Planets and Space) as the geometric basis. Using UV mapping in Blender, a global albedo map of Phobos was projected onto the model surface. A custom Geometry Nodes network then sampled pixel intensities for each vertex and displaced them along local surface normals proportionally to the image lumi