An Arty Astronomical Exhibition

Well, the art exhibition opening on Saturday was a great success! I got to talk to quite a few people who came through over the course of the multi-hour event and ended up being put on the spot as soon as I showed up (I was the first of the PhD students involved to arrive) to say a few words about the process, so I'm glad I dressed up a bit. This was also my first opportunity to see much of Carolyn and Pam's work and to see everything professionally arranged and lit, so it was quite impressive.

This picture shows two of my friends' projects, a black hole (bottom), brown dwarf (left), white hole (top), and the James Webb Space Telescope (right). The JWST model is I believe 1/12 scale, and it's still over a meter long! I spent an hour and a half on Thursday helping hang it from the ceiling which was quite an experience. They're in a darkened room where there's an animation about the Deeper Wider Faster project that inspired this exhibition playing, and they look amazing in the darkness.

Another friend of mine made this imaginative representation of a spiral galaxy being red- and blue-shifted by rotation. She planned it all out in code and matplotlib before making it and it came out very impressive (and fragile unfortunately, though that's true more or less of all our work!). We were all pleasantly surprised on Saturday to discover that the spiral structure, which didn't show up much from the side, was silhouetted on the wall behind it due to the lighting.

And here's me with my model! I got it to a point where I could both continue to add detail to it but could also call it finished at any point, and I'm pretty happy with where it ended up. (The only thing I'm not pleased with is that the cardboard platform in the middle developed a significant bow to it [probably due to absorbing water from the paint], but by the time I'd noticed it it was too late to really do much about it.)

There's also a lot of other nifty artworks, but I don't want to spoil all the surprises for people who can still go see it! (Plus I was so absorbed in admiring them that I forgot to get pictures of a lot of them.) I'm almost certainly going to visit again while the exhibition is open, so perhaps closer to the end I can put up a few more pictures. A hui hou!