I'm a real stickler for realism, so I made a starscape showing the stars as they would appear in the Tau Ceti system on July 3, 2794 at 0839 UTC.
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 and entered it into Celestia. Given the large size of Tau Ceti's planets and lack of a Jupiter, I decided to max out the size of planet E (which is in the most habitable orbit) and split it into a small ice(water?) giant with a large moon on which to put the colony. It's like Uranus, execpt smaller, warmer, and not sideways. It looks like a large green moon with rings from the Marathon's vantage point.
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.
I've uploaded two versions to Simplici7y, a 2048x1080 version and a 8192x4320 version. The 2048 version has a neat texuture I made a month or two ago for the Marathon. It's actually a shot of Phobos, but Deimos photos are harder to come by. The 8192 version - and yes it does work! - has crystal-clear stars and an easily visible Sol (if you know where to look) but no cratery texture, just a badly-wrapped plasma render.
Having this now really makes me wish Aleph One could wrap landscapes only once. It's a bit weird seeing the moon out two directions, but, I still think it's worth it.
Thoughts? Suggestions? I'm not making huge changes to the scene, as it was an extemely time-consuming pain to stitch together the 17 Celestia screenshots with Hugin. But, I could retexture the Marathon or maybe even the moon, or play with the (already supersaturated) colours of the Milky Way. Not that I have time right now, classes started yesterday. I wanted to kick this one project out the door before I dive into study, but I might make another version at some point.
http://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-over-tau-ceti-e-i-landscape-texture-2048
http://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-over-tau-ceti-e-i-landscape-texture
EDIT
I should have put this in Artwork, sorry.