Top-down and edgewise look at some unbarred spirals. Time progresses from left to right, with earlier/younger appearance at the left, and later/older appearance at the right, approaching or reaching lenticular stage. Galaxies not necessarily to scale. By my understanding, the older, rounder ones are typically much larger than their younger forms.
Photoshop has a new symmetry mode which I made heavy use of to draw these. I also discovered that I am terrible at drawing logarithmic spirals myself, so I made use of an online graphing tool to get the curves right.
Tags: illustration galaxy spiral galaxies
An attempt to visualize what a green pea galaxy might look like if we could see one up close. Hubble recently took an observation of one, and it left me a tad dissatisfied. Did you know that there is no nearby example of a green pea galaxy, or anything even similar? Actually, these tiny smudges are considered nearby compared to, say, something twice as far away. What I mean is they are small enough and far enough away that we can't see any details. They are near enough to do spectroscopy though, which tells us a lot about them.
I decided to illustrate how I thought it might look, but my first try needed some modification. After a brief Twitter exchange, Drs. Sangeeta Malhortra and William Keel set me in the right direction. Hate on Twitter all you want, but it's sometimes very useful!
I used a combination of clone stamp painting for the star clusters and free airbrushing with my pen tablet for the green clouds/streamers. The base galaxy I modified was a real dwarf galaxy I processed a while back: flic.kr/p/XgFVxh
There's a really great figure in this paper showing some pea galaxy details! They are still quite small and fuzzy, but some of the tendrils can be seen in some of them.
Data from Gems of the Galaxy Zoos inspired this work. Specifically, observations jds42kcfq and jds42kceq. The original observed galaxy takes up about 21x31 pixels on the detector.
If this was a real observation, it would probably use a combination of wideband near-infrared, visible green, and near-UV filters along with narrowband H-alpha and [OIII] filters.
North is technically 136.53° clockwise from up.
Tags: green pea galaxy starburst illustration streamers [O III] emission ionizing radiation oxygen nebula gas star formation dwarf faint fuzzies
A simple view from the seventh exoplanet orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1. Five other exoplanets are visible as pricks of light in the sky.
Update: I added some sundogs generated by Les Cowley's and Michael Shroeder's HaloSim, which actually allows me to not only set the diameter of the star, but also the focal length of the lens for a fairly accurate representation. I did have to shrink the halo slightly to get the sundogs to fit in the frame comfortably. The other alternative would have been to expand the edges of the landscape, which I didn't feel like doing.
One tip I can offer to anyone wanting to use HaloSim themselves is to generate several images with a lower ray count and then create an averaged/mean stack of them rather than one image with a tremendous ray count. I ran it overnight with a number of rays I knew my computer would never finish by the time I woke up and noted the image was blown out rather than nice and smooth. So a stack of several simulations provides a smoother result, even though it requires more human interaction.
Tags: exoplanets TRAPPIST-1 TRAPPIST-1h sundogs HaloSim Blender 3d illustration
Cassini's imminent demise got me thinkin' about Saturn and the meaning of life and everything. It's not hard at all to get me to feel sad or depressed as some of you may have noticed, but that aside it's still pretty darn depressing.
These two uploads are a couple of 3D renderings I made quite a while ago using Blender/Cycles. And I have to mention that I used Björn Jónsson's planetary maps for them, because he is great, and it would be a shame to pass up a chance to point you to such a excellent resource. bjj.mmedia.is/data/planetary_maps.html
Tags: Saturn 3d illustration Blender Cycles
Cassini's imminent demise got me thinkin' about Saturn and the meaning of life and everything. It's not hard at all to get me to feel sad or depressed as some of you may have noticed, but that aside it's still pretty darn depressing.
These two uploads are a couple of 3D renderings I made quite a while ago using Blender/Cycles. And I have to mention that I used Björn Jónsson's planetary maps for them, because he is great, and it would be a shame to pass up a chance to point you to such a excellent resource. bjj.mmedia.is/data/planetary_maps.html
Tags: Saturn 3d illustration Blender Cycles