Category Archives: astronomy

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!

astronomy, astronomy media, t leporis

Aperture Fever

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Slaking the Thirst for Bigger Mirrors

Sometimes astronomers come down with a peculiar condition called Aperture Fever. In short, no matter what size their telescope mirror is, they always want a bigger one.  But, there’s a limit to the size of mirror (or radio dish) you can build and still have it be useful.  You could probably pour a piece of glass 100 meters across, if you wanted to. You could build a huge radio dish, if you wanted to.  But, getting a big piece of glass or a monstrous dish on a support and keeping them from breaking under the pull of gravity (or at the very least, keeping them from distorting and bending due to gravity’s tug on it) would render them useless.

Light collected by three VLT Auxiliary Telescopes, and combined using the technique of interferometry, provides astronomers with vision as sharp as that from a giant telescope with a diameter equal to the largest separation between the telescopes used. To obtain the image of T Leporis using data from the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers used the four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes in different configurations to mimic a telescope almost 100 metres in diameter, as represented schematically on this artist’s impression of the Paranal platform
Light collected by three VLT Auxiliary Telescopes, and combined using the technique of interferometry, provides astronomers with vision as sharp as that from a giant telescope with a diameter equal to the largest separation between the telescopes used. To obtain the image of T Leporis using data from the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers used the four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes in different configurations to mimic a telescope almost 100 metres in diameter, as represented schematically on this artist’s impression of the Paranal platform

There are some cures for aperture fever, however. The latest was demonstrated in Chile by a group of French astronomers who ganged together all the telescopes at the European Southern Observatory.

Essentially, what the astronomers did was create a 100-meter-wide interferometer — a sort of “virtual” telescope consisting of several smaller (1.8-meter) VLT Auxiliary telescopes. The result was an aperture the size of a much larger telescope. They made several observing runs with this special set-up to collect the light  streaming from their target, and then combined that light into one very fine image.

What makes this use doubly cool is that they used it to create one of the first infrared interferometry observations.  That’s quite a feat.

Their target was the star T Leporis, a type of pulsating star called a Mira variable (named after the star Mira, which is the “prototype” for these kinds of stars).

Mira stars are among the biggest factories of molecules and dust in the universe. T Leporis is a fine example of this activity. It pulsates with a period of 380 days and loses the equivalent of the Earth’s mass in dust and gas every year. Since the molecules and dust get created in the layers of atmosphere surrounding the central star,  astronomers would like to be able to look at these layers in great detail to see how it all happens. But this is no easy task, given that the stars themselves are so far away. Even though we’re talking about a huge star, from a distance of 500 light-years T Leporis appears quite small — about half a millionth of the size of the Sun. This is where interferometry and repeated observing runs can make a huge difference.

The reconstructed image shows this star up-close. It’s 100 times larger than the Sun, and is surrounded by a sphere of gas about three times larger than the star itself. That we can even see this level of detail in a star that lies 500 light-years away shows that aperture fever can be slaked with a virtual telescope and the right amount of observing time.