Category Archives: astrovisualization

astrovisualization

Designing the Cosmos

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Blending Art and Science

Cosmological visualization... what does it say to you?
Cosmological visualization... what does it say to you? (Courtesy NASA/STScI)

I’ve written before about space art and astronomy visualization, but there’s always a new artist or a new way of looking at the universe popping up.  There are whole clans of people who work on finding ways to take astronomy data and turn it into eye-smacking artwork and images.  In turn, we can all look at their work and understand a little bit better how the cosmos looks and behaves.

Take the cosmological visualization I’ve posted here. It’s actually quite a nice piece of artwork and I’d have no problem with hanging a print of it in my office. But, like all art, you have to ask: “what does it mean?”  To an artist, it may represent a balance of light and dark, a gradation of colors, a counterpoint of smooth and active textures and regions of heaviness and lightness, all blended into one painting.

But, look at it with scientific curiousity and it becomes a visualization of the process of cosmic creation.  It depicts, from right to left, the emergence of large-scale structure in our cosmos in the epochs after the Big Bang, which took place just off the right side of this image (and some 13.7 billion years ago in real time).

After the Big Bang, the universe began a headlong expansion effort that continues today.  Free electrons and protons began forming atomic hydrogen, the first — and most abundant — element in the cosmos. Those atoms could absorb light, which they did, turning the cosmos into a murky place. This period is called,  appropriately enough, the Cosmic Dark Ages. The golden area depicts that murky time. It may look bland, but there was action going on there as atoms of hydrogen crowded together to make the first stars.

About 900 million years later, the universe began lighting up as those first stars and the massive quasars began generating ultraviolet light, which turned hydrogen atoms back to protons and electrons. In the process the universe began to light up again. This was the Epoch of Reionization. At first it occurred in isolated bubbles, but as time went by, they spread out and connected, and eventually the universe was freed of its murky dark ages. Light could travel freely as the galaxies and stars continued forming and expanding.

So, this picture (created by the Goddard Science Visualization Studio) is really an artful depiction of the Cosmic Dawn, using real science data to draw imagery of a time we could never see or experience for ourselves (in real time).  Isn’t it amazing?

astronomy, astrovisualization, Lunar Orbiter images

Restoring Old Visions

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Early Visions of Earth and the Moon

Earth as seen by one of the Lunar Orbiters as it came around the Moon during a survey mission.
Earth as seen by NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 as it came around the Moon during a survey mission. (Click to embiggen)

Now that the Indian Space Research Organisation has rammed into the Moon with their Moon Impact probe, it’s time to look back at the U.S.’s own first efforts to study our nearest neighbor in space. The early heady early days of lunar exploration — a time that I look back to through a certain thickness of rose-colored glasses — brought humanity’s first looks at our planet as a planet — and of course, our first up-close visions of the Moon’s surface. I was in grade school then, getting ready for the rigors of junior high and high school, and I was space-mad even then. I pored over every picture they published from the Gemini and Lunar Orbiter missions, and then once we started sending people to the Moon, I followed that, too.

So, it was fun to see the first of what I hope are many of the 1960s-era “glamour shots” of the Moon and Earth being re-released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program. These images were first used to help pinpoint landing spots for the subsequent Apollo missions. At the time they were sent back, the technology to recover high-resolution imagery didn’t exist, but the data were there. Scientists got what they needed from the tapes and then put them in storage.

Fast-forward a few decades and the tape drives containing all that information were the subject of a rescue effort by Nancy Evans (who worked at JPL) and Mark Nelson (from CalTech).  They spent some time trying to raise private funds to recover the data, and eventually the tapes and drives got sent back to storage in a barn in Sun Valley, California.

Eventually the tapes made their way back to NASA Ames and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program was born, led by Dennis Wingo (the project program lead).

The cool thing about the recovery of these images is that they are still extremely scientifically useful, especially now that high-tech image recovery and enhancement techniques can be used to bring out the full resolution inherent in the data.  The restored images will give scientists a basic set of images — a baseline, if you will — against which they can measure the images now coming in from various lunar probes, and particularly those from the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission in 2009. Any surface changes that have occurred since the Lunar Orbiter images were taken will be quite obvious and will help mission planners assess the long-term risks that moon explorers and eventual colonists will have to face as they set up shop on the Moon’s surface. The recovered images will be made available to the public as they come out of the recovery “chute” at Ames, and will also be put into the Planetary Data System. The USGS will be working on calibrating them with standard mapping coordinates to bring them up to par with other solar system bodies over the past decades.