Failed Endeavor

Somewhere, far away from us, a robot culture had established a home for themselves on a gaseous planet. However, space had run out, and so they looked for a new place to colonize. The decision fell onto their closest neighbor, a strongly canyonized moon with strange rock formations. One of them was sent to discover its conditions.
At the same time, the light from a close nebula reached the moon. It was the light of a dying star - accompanied by highly energetic gamma-rays. The robot did not return.

--

This is my entry piece for the "Unknown Moons" Contest.
Edit: I got 7th: [link]
This started out with a Vue-render where I had massive displacement-mapping applied to the rocks. It was a pain in the rear to render the scene. Nevertheless, after a couple out-of-memory-exceptions and freezing of the whole app this render went through. Meanwhile, I was working on the nebula in the background, testing out some (at least for me) new techniques.

The uber-basic concept behind: a robot stands in some sort of canyon formed by spikey rocks, looking up into the sky. The supernova makes his electronics crash and he has to rust in piece.

At this point, a mad load of Thank Yous to the following deviants who have supported me with valuable critique (basically anybody in the SpaceArt-chat that was willing to talk to me) :

You guys rock!

During the time of making, my desktop computer crashed (as in: "format c:" was the only option I had left), so I had to finish it on my laptop. It's quite horrible working on there, considering the

Facts:
- Tools: Photoshop, Vue. Wacom Intuos 3.
- Dimensions: 4000 x 6500 pixels
- layers: 61
- PSD Filesize: 728MB
- Total creation time: I lost count after 20h but I estimate something around 40 spread over half a month.
- most lol-some title that has been thought of: "Transchematic reclarification of all prior bounds of understanding" (j4m3sb0nd, you make me laugh)

I hope you can enjoy it. Comments and favs are highly appreciated, as usually.