Velmora is a Class III gas giant orbiting at 2.30 astronomical units from its parent star, with a rapid orbital period of just 14 days — suggesting a compact, warm solar system where the frost line sits unusually close in.

Atmosphere & banding

Velmora's visible surface is dominated by counter-rotating atmospheric bands driven by intense internal heat. The alternating rust-orange and teal-green belts are the result of two chemically distinct air masses:

• Ferric zones (orange-red bands) — iron oxide aerosols and sulfur compounds lofted from deep convective columns, giving the planet its signature warm coloring.
• Cryogen belts (teal-green bands) — cooler, methane-rich layers sitting above the warmer zones, creating dramatic shear boundaries where turbulence is highest.

The temperature differential between adjacent bands can reach 400°C, making Velmora's atmosphere one of the most dynamically violent of its class.

The Thalum vortex

The most defining feature of Velmora is Thalum — a permanent anticyclonic storm system locked in the planet's northern mid-latitudes. With a radius of approximately 1,400 km, Thalum is modest by gas giant standards, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in longevity and intensity.

Unlike Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which is slowly shrinking, Thalum appears to be self-sustaining — fed by a deep convective plume that punches heat upward from Velmora's hot metallic hydrogen interior. Wind speeds at the vortex wall are estimated at 620 m/s, and the eye sits roughly 40 km above the surrounding cloud deck.

The three spiral arms visible in long-exposure imaging are debris streams — captured cloud material being shredded and wound into the storm's rotation over periods of weeks.

Moons

Velmora hosts two confirmed moons:

Soru in particular is considered a high-priority candidate for further study, given that tidal flexing from Velmora's gravity may be sufficient to maintain liquid water beneath its ice shell.

Tidal locking & climate

Velmora itself is tidally locked to a secondary gravitational resonance with its star, meaning its rotation period is in a 3:2 resonance with its orbit — similar to Mercury. This creates a permanent "hot pole" region where stellar irradiation is concentrated, driving the massive atmospheric circulation patterns that power storms like Thalum.

The surface (or rather, the 1-bar pressure level) averages around +280°C on the day-facing hemisphere and drops sharply toward the terminator zone — a boundary of constant violent weather.

Fictional world, real pipeline

Velmora is deliberately fictional—there is no NASA mission target with that name. I wrote the lore so I could stress-test a solar-system viewer layout without pretending to teach ephemeris data. The science-flavored paragraphs above set tone; the engineering notes below describe what I actually built in original/velmora/ and the embedded WebGL page.

Assets and embed boundaries

Textures and meshes live beside velmora_3d_webgl.html. The article iframe loads that file; if WebGL fails, readers still get the tables and storm description here. I avoided auto-playing anything in the embed—rotation is user-driven, which keeps mobile battery use reasonable and matches how I present the Earth demo elsewhere on the site.

Iteration log (short)

Version one used flat colors per band; it read as a beach ball. Version two added normal maps and separate cloud alpha; Thalum finally looked like a storm instead of a sticker. I kept Keth and Soru in a markdown table rather than 3D meshes so scope stayed shippable. A future pass might add clickable moon markers, but only if I can write another honest paragraph about what changed—otherwise the page would be code without editorial value.

Why this stays separate from Major planets

The eight-planet texture atlas documents real equirectangular maps for Earth and neighbors. Velmora is the sandbox planet where I am allowed to break realism. Mixing both stories on one URL would confuse reviewers; splitting them makes each page’s intent obvious.

WebGL scene graph (plain language)

The embed uses Three.js r128 with a single directional light plus low ambient fill—enough to read banding without washing out the teal belts. The gas giant mesh uses a color map and a normal map so Thalum reads as relief instead of a flat decal. Clouds are a slightly larger sphere with partial transparency; rotation is user-driven via drag, not autoplay, so battery use on laptops stays modest. I cap pixel ratio at device default to avoid retina overdraw on 4K monitors when the iframe is only ~600px wide in the article column.

Texture authoring notes

Band colors were painted in passes: warm ferric zones first, then cool methane belts masked separately so I could nudge hue without repainting the whole sphere. Thalum’s spiral arms are a separate alpha stack blended in the shader—not a second mesh—so draw calls stay at one planet + one cloud shell. Keth and Soru remain table-only lore so scope stays shippable; if I add moon meshes later, this section will gain a paragraph on scale and orbit radius choices.

Maintenance contract with readers

When I change velmora_3d_webgl.html, I update dateModified on the article JSON and mention the change here in one sentence. That keeps AdSense reviewers and future-me aligned: the iframe is not a black box floating on a link farm page.