Art Space

Every year we do a holiday card and letter that we create ourselves. The front is usually a pretty picture of some kind, the inside is our annual letter, and the back is a star chart so folks can go stargazing for a week around Christmas Day and see some lovely sights.

HST-based Holiday Card
HST-based Holiday Card

This year we found our “pretty picture” artwork on the Hubble Space Telescope holiday card web pages. They have designed a series of printable pieces suitable for greeting cards, sort of like this one.

I think the designs they came up with are very clever and show artful use of space images as design elements. What are design elements, you might wonder. They are what they seem to be: elements of design, whether colors, image portions, graphics, sculpted text, and shapes that breathe life into a piece of artwork (and that’s really what each of these designer cards is).

I’ve used space images as elements throughhout my website and blog, and if you visit enough astronomy and space science-related blogs, you’ll see bits and pieces of space scattered through those pages, too. Look at the logo in Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site. There’s an actual astro-image mapped over his title letters. Or, check out The Nine8 Planets page uses images of the planets as a sort of logo in the upper left corner. Or, one of our blogrollees, Observing the Sky, is using two astro images in the banner to achieve an appropriately “spacey” look.

Pay attention as you rove the Web and see what other design elements from space have made their way into people’s blogs and online spaces. You’d be surprised at how popular space images are in the blogging world, even if the sites aren’t about space.

The More We Look…

… the More We Find

Uranus
Sirius and its companion, from HST

Astronomy is a win-win proposition. You look at the sky with your naked eye and you see stars, planets, maybe a galaxy or two if you have the right observing conditions. You can always find something great to see.

If you magnify the view, you get to see more stuff that’s dimmer, farther away, and in more detail. It’s the science that keeps on giving, no matter what at what level you understand things.

If you REALLY magnify the view, say with a telescope like Hubble, you find things you’d never see with the naked eye. The top image is a view of the star Sirus, which lies just over 8 light-years away. It’s a blue-white star, and if you look at the belt of Orion and trace a line down from it to the horizon, you’ll run right into Sirius.

This star has a companion which is terribly difficult to see. It’s a white dwarf star called Sirius B. It’s not an easy star to spot because the brightness of Sirius overpowers the faint little glow of the companion. Hubble scientists managed to spot this Sirius-hugging little star by overexposing the bright star to get the dim glow of its little sibling.

Uranus Magnified
Uranus Magnified

The second image is a result of ongoing observations of the planet Uranus. HST scientists found a pair of rings (very thin, to be sure) circling the gas giant. We already knew that Uranus had rings, but this new discovery also tells us something is furnishing the dust that creates planetary rings. In thise case, a little moon called Mab that orbits the planet is most likely the source of the dust. Meteoroid impacts knock material from Mab’s surface, sending it into space. Ultimately it gets caught up into orbit around Uranus.

This is why I find astronomy a continual source of fascination. There’s always something new to find, to see, to learn. The universe is a great show-and-tell machine!