When first watching TNG, the main title credits (especially in Season 3) reminded me a lot of the artwork from the earlier Cosmos series on PBS. Did Rick Sternbach rework some those paintings for Star Trek? Maybe I'm just seeing the similarity in technique, but remember looking through my Cosmos book and he was credited on some images.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rick+sternbach+cosmos&l=1 The internet is a powerful tool http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0827895/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
Yeah, I suppose subconsciously I was hoping he'd see his name in the title. And I was surprised we were both born in the same year. Yeah, I know, I've been using it before it was called the internet. I looked for an answer before making the thread. I know he worked on both shows. But your suggestions don't answer the question.
I painted the plane of the galaxy used in the distant background, and a few of us worked on the developing solar system model with the swirly coalescing planets. All of the art was new; nothing reworked from COSMOS, though some of the 3-D VFX flight through or past different objects did seem reminiscent of the COSMOS travels, though that was likely due to our VFX folks mentally channeling that earlier effort. Rick