Artsnova Digital Art and Space

Trouvelot astronomical illustration: Sonne III

Earlier this evening while doing research for my upcoming presentation on space art at the International Space Development Conference (see Art and the Promotion of Space Exploration), I was looking for information about Étienne Trouvelot, an astronomical artist active during the 1870’s. Quite to my surprise, I found a small gallery of his art at the New York Public Library web site. The 15 images are all from his book The Trouvelot astronomical drawings published in 1881 by Scribner’s Sons.

Of the images contained in the gallery, my two favorites are Mare Humorum, from a lunar study made in 1875, and The planet Mars, drawn based on observations from September 3, 1877. To view these and the rest of the images, visit New York Public Library’s Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings gallery.

P.S. Trouvelot is perhaps more well known as being the individual responsible for the accidental introduction of the gypsy moth to North America.

Ad Astra, Jim

Astronomy Day

Yesterday was Astronomy Day. I had been asked to speak at the Astronomy Day event at Harper College in Palatine IL. My presentation was The Universe According to Monty Python in which I spend an hour explaining the lyrics of the two minute long Galaxy Song which was featured in the movie The Meaning of Life.

I must say that for a bunch of comedians they did a pretty good job of getting their astronomy right but they did have professional help. During the course of my talk lots of big numbers get thrown around. As a rule the best laugh comes with my follow up to the line about the sun being the source of all our power where I segue into an explanation of nucleosynthesis. Whereas Carl Sagan looked at the situation through rose colored glasses when he said that we’re all made of “starstuff”, I level with the audience and tell them the truth: that we’re all nothing more than nuclear waste. Folks really seem to like hearing this.

Also, as a rule, people do not raise questions about the astronomical aspects of my talk but do ask questions when the subject turns to cosmology and relativity. To me this is only natural as those concepts are more alien to our everyday experiences and touch on the very nature of the universe.

For contrast, this Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk to all the third graders at a local grade school. My talk is The Solar System in 3D and the kids get to wear geeky red-blue anaglyph glasses. Believe it or not, third graders are a great audience. They are very curious and not at all afraid to ask questions.

Ad Astra, Jim

Zero Energy Abstract Art

After adding three old images to the Artsnova Space Gallery last Friday, I thought that I had better add something new to another of the galleries.

Zero Energy is a play on the physics term of zero-point energy, which is the lowest possible energy state of a quantum mechanical system. For more on the physics behind the term see Calphysics Institute: Introduction to Zero-Point Energy.

All “drawn” shapes in the image are perfect circles. However you will notice that the circles are organized into rectangular blocks - think of round pegs in square holes.

For more, see the Zero Energy gallery page. The page also contains a link to a full size version of a portion of the image as the details can not be discerned in the scaled down version.

Ad Astra, Jim

Mistress Moon

I have just completed adding three new pieces of astronomical art to my Artsnova Space Gallery. These are not new art but art that I had not previously added to my web site. In fact I still have a backlog of art to add. I am also planning on adding at least two new galleries in the near future. One will be a portrait gallery and the other will be an Americana gallery.

Following are thumbnails of the three new images. Clicking the thumbnail will take you to the pictures details page where you can see a larger version of the image.

Mistress Moon

In Mistress Moon I have recreated an antiqued rendition of our Moon. Mistress Moon started out as a photograph of a moon globe. When I started working the piece I had no strong idea of what I wanted to accomplish. And therein lies the beauty of working digitally - the degree to which I can experiment with different styles and effects is far greater than the traditional artist can achieve. As I worked the final concept slowly evolved until finally I knew what impression I wanted to create.

Rorschach Moon

Rorschach Moon was created using a pastel-oriented palette of colors. You have probably heard the story of how the Beatles song A Day in the Life was actually the product of the merger of two different songs. Rorschach Moon is similar in that it started out as two different works of art. Individually I had been working on creating a nebula experimenting with different techniques. I was simultaneously working on an image of the Moon. As I was doing so it hit me that I was employing similar coloring techniques on both images. It was at that point that I decided to combine the two into one and to produce a final unified piece.

Sands of Mars by Jim Plaxco

Unlike the two previous images, Sands of Mars is based on an actual photograph of the surface of Mars. I have long been a lecturer on the subject of Mars and have prided myself on illustrating my presentations with images created from the raw data files returned by the various robotic missions to Mars. This freed me from having to rely on the finished images offered up by the various NASA science and PR organizations.

I was searching through the newly released online archives of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at the Planetary Data System Imaging Node when I came across a MRO Context Camera (CTX) image that I found particularly arresting. I downloaded the PDS IMG file and converted it to a GIF using NASAVIEW. I then used Photoshop to crop, contrast enhance, clean, and colorize the image. Colorization consisted of using multiple coloring layers and masks to achieve the final effect. I must say that I am far more pleased with this image than the one that NASA included in their Mars As Art gallery (my entry appears on gallery page 2, last row, middle image). Of course this image did not exist at that time.

I hope that you enjoy the art and these brief explanations of the process by which they were created.

Ad Astra, Jim