Voyage to the Spaghetti Sauce Planet

Wait…

Wait…

Behold the Planet of Spaghetti Sauce!

It is now clear what I must do.

A shallower pot. A thicker sauce. And additional lighting sources.

Yes, we’re off to bizzarro land.

Last night I was making up a bunch of macaroni and beef and, as I shook the last dregs of sauce out of the jar (no, I have not progressed to the point of making my own sauce from scratch. Instead, I ‘modify’ off the shelf product with my own blend of additional ingredients) and I happened to notice that it was making some very nice craters, rills and other geological features that looked as if they’d come straight from a Lunar flyby.

So I put dinner on hold and immediately began snapping pictures. (Have you ever seen someone standing over the stove, on a chair, taking pictures of a pot of sauce?)

I shoved the pictures into photoshop and began playing around. Grayscale, obviously. The most interesting views (and the one that seemed most realistic to me) were achieved by standing about four feet away from the monitor.

It was fairly obvious that I’m close to achieving the effects I’m looking for, but not quite there yet. I need a shallower pot so that I can take images from better angles, I need a thicker sauce that will hold the cratering longer and more firmly, and I probably need to light it all with sources other than the camera’s flash; that way, I can get those cool ‘edge of the crater’ highlights.

Who’d have thunk it? Planetary landscapes in a pot of sauce.