Category Archives: astronomy art

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 Glorious Belt

Orions Belt, by SkyFactory.org.
Orion's Belt, by SkyFactory.org -- fantastic images!

I am always amazed at the artistry that astronomers bring to their imaging. While browsing the Astronomy Picture of the Day archives I ran across this image of the three belt stars in Orion (one of my favorite constellations). IMHO, Davide De Martin has created a masterpiece!

Of course, I’m a huge fan of nebulae. Just as I like Mars for its stark beauty and promise of future exploration, I find starbirth nebulae to be … ah… pregnant with stellar promise. Fecund with the bounty of future stars to come!

Why is this? I don’t know, exactly. Maybe it has something to do with the idea that starbirth was one of those last frontier subjects that we could only speculate about for so long, until we had the means to peer deep inside the nurseries and see what was happening with young stellar objects and such. For decades nebulae were “mysterious” and “impenetrable.” No longer, not with the advent of infrared-sensitive instruments that could can cut through the veil hiding the secret birth places of stars.

Not that the Belt Stars are hidden. But the region they front for is a cauldron of stellar creation, and the more we look into this area, the more we find. It’s fascinating and awe-inspiring.

So, if you’re in the mood to see some hot starbirth action, go out and find the Belt Stars of Orion and then check out the greyish-green fog of light just beneath them… the Orion Nebula. It’s a hotbed of young stars newly emerged from their birth cocoons. Beautiful, but hardly mysterious anymore.