Monthly Archives: February 2009

astronomy, space art

Art of Space

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Visions of the Cosmos from the Mind of an Artist

I’ve written about space art before, about how much I like the genre and how inspiring it is. Part of this is because I am smitten with gorgeous actual images of stars, planets and galaxies, and I love to see how artists depict them. I also like space art because it (like astronomy) takes us to places we’ll likely never visit on our own.  I went stooging around the Web today looking for good space art. Here are some lovely places and pieces I found — and I encourage you to visit the associated Web sites for more info.

The granddaddy of space artists was Chesley Bonestell. Over at Bonestell Space Art, you can follow his career through his art.  Check it out!

The Astronomer, by Ryan Bliss of Digital Blasphemy.com
The Astronomer, by Ryan Bliss of Digital Blasphemy.com

Another artist whose work I’ve been supporting with a modest yearly membership to his website is Ryan Bliss at Digital Blasphemy.  I’m continually amazed at his work and you’ll love it, too!

He releases new images pretty regularly, and makes them available in a variety of sizes for desktop use.

Ryan also links to a user gallery that features stunning views of the cosmos by artists such as Markus Gann (3dSceneries.com), as well as work from another space artist who goes by the name Kerem and his work adorns album covers (among other things.)

Jeff Quick is another artist whose work I enjoy. He displays his images and music under the name Moodflow. The site is gorgeous and a couple of his publicly available pieces show up on my desktop from time to time. He uses various programs to create his ‘scapes.

Alpha Orionis -- from Moodflow.com (Click to embiggen)
Alpha Orionis -- from Moodflow.com (Click to embiggen)

Jeff’s landscape of a planet at Alpha Orionis evokes a sort of quiet awe in the viewer at the same as it takes you to a place around a star that we see only from our vantage point around 500 light-years away. Whether or not there actually ARE such planets around that star is somewhat immaterial. The point is, the artwork TAKES you there! What you do after you get there is up to you and your imagination!

When I look at imagery like this it takes me back to the earliest days when I began to appreciate astronomy and the worlds beyond our planet. I used to imagine what it would be like to float among the rings of Saturn or take a ship to another planet around another star.

Cold Fire (a free download) by Inga Nielsen. (Click to embiggen.)
Cold Fire (a free download) by Inga Nielsen. (Click to embiggen.)

Inga Nielsen creates otherworldly views at her web page called Gate to Nowhere. Some are astronomy-oriented while others are more phantasmagorical.

I especially like her Cold Fire scene, with what appears to be an active star seen from the surface of a nearby frozen world. Maybe this is what the end of the Sun’s life will look like from the vantage point of a distant planet some 5 billion years from now.

For those folks who would like to emulate her work, Inga gives tutorials (albeit in German) on how to create the scenes she presents.

There are many, many good space artists showing their wares on the Web these days. Simply go to Google and type in the words “space art” and marvel at the scenes and worlds they take you to!

Happy art-gazing!

Opinion

The Future of Tree-based Science Knowledge

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Is Grim. What Replaces It?

I had lunch and dinner recently with former colleagues of mine back from when I worked at Sky & Telescope. The topic of conversation came around (as it usually does) to the fact that tree-based dissemination of knowledge (via magazines and newspapers) is giving way to knowledge being made available via electronic means (Web, Internet, etc.).  This is causing all sorts of changes in the print/info industry, not all of it good. I know that S&T, for example, has downsized its staff (or rather, the parent corporation that owns S&T is ordering those downsizes), and that similar layoffs are occurring at newspapers and magazines everywhere. I have to assume that this is because of a number of factors: migration of advertisers to online business models, migration of readers to online sources of information, cost of labor (money to pay writers and editors for print publications), and cost of equipment and buildings to maintain print products.  In short, money’s tight, people and equipment cost a lot, and it’s often cheaper to put the news out online. How you make money from that is the big question that I suspect gets rocketed around the executive suites of news organizations a lot.

At our place we decided that we didn’t need to get a daily newspaper, so we stopped getting it. We still get a few magazines, but have cut those back quite a bit, too.  Because I’m a science writer, I already have many, many good sources of information online, and don’t need to get print subscriptions to journals (I have electronic subscriptions).  In short, I get a lot of my news online and rely on fewer print pubs to give me more in-depth looks.

I thought about all this when I got the news that another friend got laid off from a job as a science writer at a magazine. I notice that science writers in general have been getting the boot a lot.  For example, Miles O’Brien was summarily shoved out at CNN (thus depriving the network of a good, qualified science writer/reporter).  What sort of message do these layoffs send to other writers? To the public?  That science isn’t important enough to be covered? That years of experience in science writing isn’t worthy of treasuring in a news organization?  (But sports ad nauseum, politics up the wazoo, opinion columns that are sometimes thinly disguised propaganda for political or business interests, and bra and panty ads are more necessary to a modern civilization than an understanding of the technology and science we use every day?)

For the sake of our societies as well as the science writers whose collective wisdom is being thrown on the junkheap of progress, I hope that as we move to an electronic-based information model, some of the people who are now being left in the dust as print media collapses will bring their voices online.  We can’t afford to lose them.