Category Archives: astrovisualization

astrovisualization, hubble space telescope

Science Viz

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What is It?  What Isn’t It?

My last entry featured a lovely image of Saturn and several of its moons. I hope you had a chance to look it over because it’s really quite breathtaking.  The image was part of a sequence of images that were taken with HST and those images were used to make a scientific visualization of the event. Was it a movie?  An animation? Or what?

As Frank Summers, a scientific visualizer who works at Space Telescope Science Institute explains in a thought-provoking blog entry about the images and animation of this event (work done by artist Greg Bacon), HST is not a movie camera. It’s an observatory. And the images it takes can be used to make visualizations that help us understand the science behind the observations. There’s a fine line there and he discusses it in a nicely written entry about visualizations, movies, and animations.

Science visualizations are part of my life as a producer of various bits of media for astronomy outreach. I’m always on the lookout for good viz, so to speak, and in my own mind I know the difference between data-driven visualizations versus actual imagery. But, that may not be true of audience members who simply see the visual work and accept it as a simulation or real image or whatever it’s being represented as. Digital manipulation of data in the service of education and outreach is very common in our field.  And, I suspect that we’ll always have the question of “is it visualization, an image or an animation?” And, when does it  matter and when doesn’t it?  Frank talks about that — so go check it out — from the blog of the master.

astronomy news, astrovisualization, hubble space telescope, starbirth, stars

Hey, You! Yeah, Look at THOSE Bright Stars!

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Follow the Pointer

A wide-field image of WR-25 and Tr16-244 in the Carina Nebula. Courtesy NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
A wide-field image of WR-25 and Tr16-244 in the Carina Nebula. Courtesy NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

My friend Phil Plait has a thing about instances of pareidolia — the tendency of humans to see interesting patterns in things.  It’s a peculiar psychological thing that our primate brains do to us when we see things we don’t immediately understand or can’t place in context. So, for example, you look up at clouds in the sky and see spaceships or dogs playing or sheep sleeping or whatever it is that the cloud seems to resemble. And, of course, there are tendencies among some folks to see things like faces of deities in toast and tortillas, or peeling paint, or the bark on trees. It’s all very amusing and shows you how complex our brains are.

Astronomy images provide hours of merriment for pareidoliacs.  Take this picture, for example.  It’s a Hubble Space Telescope view of a gas and dust cloud where star formation is taking place. Notice in the very top of the picture that there’s a thick cloud of dust in the shape of a pointing finger. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.  And, it  might appear that way to you, too.

Well, you might ask — what’s it pointing to?  Good question, and the answer is what the subject of the image really is:  a pair of massive bright stars down in the lower third of the image that are shining out like a pair of headlights. (Or, if you’re a fan of LOLcats, they look like “cat lazors” charging up.)

This scene is smack in the middle of the Carina Nebula, a huge region where clouds of gas and dust are combining to form new stars. It is about 7,500 light-years away from us, and also contains the luminous blue variable Eta Carinae, which is expected to pop off as a supernova pretty much any time now (in cosmic terms).

It turns out those two bright stars have an interesting connection to the pointy-finger cloud. The bright star in the lower center is called WR-25, and its quite massive — more than 50 times the mass of our Sun.  In fact, it’s really two stars orbiting a common center of mass. They hot, bright, and interacting with each other.

The star to the left of WR-25 is called Tr16-244, and it’s actually three stars orbiting a common center of gravity — a triple-star system. Together, these two star systems are eating away at the clouds of gas and dust. That “cannibalization by radiation” is actually what sculpted the finger-shaped cloud. It’s amost as if the cloud is pointing the finger of blame back to the stars that shaped it — a nice case of cosmic pareidolia.