Arty Astros

For anyone who's going to be in Melbourne between May 12th and July 1st, there's going to be an art exhibition happening in Hawthorn, and I'm going to be in it!

Yes, I haven't mentioned it here before, but for the past three months I've been working on a model of the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array where I worked last year to exhibit in DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER, an exhibition of astronomically-inspired artwork. It's opening on May 12, from 2–4 PM, and it's free (and includes free food and drinks!); anyone's welcome to attend, the gallery merely asks that you reserve a spot (at the link above) so they can get an idea of refreshments needed. I'll be there along with several of the other artists to talk about our various projects.

To explain how this came about, I have to go back to last year. Several of the faculty and students here at the College of Astrophysics and Supercomputing (CAS) at Swinburne are involved in a project called Deeper Wider Faster, where telescopes around the world coordinate to observe a selected patch of sky for a few nights in an attempt to catch the transient events that occur in astronomy. Perhaps a star in its death throes, exploding as a supernova millions of light-years away. Or maybe a fast radio burst, an enigmatic phenomenon lasting mere milliseconds whose origins are still shrouded in mystery. Or maybe just a previously undiscovered asteroid! (They find a lot of those.) These collaborative multi-night sessions have been happening every couple of months for over a year now. (I attended one myself for a few hours earlier this year, though my schedule unfortunately precluded me from staying longer that time.)

Now, CAS also has two in-house artists, two wonderfully creative ladies by the names of Carolyn and Pam. They attended a Deeper Wider Faster session last year and were impressed with the sheer amount of incoming data and all the technology and work that went into making it happen, and soon after, by chance, were able to secure an exhibition slot with an art gallery literally across the street from Swinburne. This was around the end of the year, so with only a few scant months to get ready they put out a call for any astronomers in Swinburne who wanted to contribute some form of astronomically-inspired artwork with themselves as mentors.

I and several other students answered the call, so since the middle of February we've been working at weekly Wednesday night sessions on projects ranging from prosaic (models of several different telescopes) to the more fanciful (models of black and white holes, or a mobile representing the red/blue shifts seen in a rotating galaxy, or painting representing explosions in space). Other students made models of some rather famous telescopes (I'm actually really impressed by the models of the James Webb Space Telescope and the two Keck telescopes that people made), but I decided to make something a little smaller and closer to my heart: a model of the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array where I worked last year as a telescope operator. It's quite different from what people think of when they think of telescopes, so I figured it'd make for a great model. I also took pictures along the way, so you can experience the process of creation with me!

I started off with a pretty clear vision of what I wanted to do, and you can see a lot of what would make it into the final model in this picture from the second session in February. I had an idea of using sections of toilet-paper tubes for the baffles around the dishes right from the start, and while picking up supplies from the art store next to Swinburne campus I picked up some balsa wood rods (in two diameters) for the legs, a block of Styrofoam for the base, and a sheet of some kind of foam-board for the dish platform. I knew I wanted to get just the telescope and its base, not the canopy or any of the surrounding structure, which was a good choice in retrospect—finishing the telescope itself took long enough. In the picture above you can see the seven future radio dishes, and the half-painted telescope legs drying.

In March I cut the platform out of the foam board and learned how to draw a hexagon with nothing but a compass (another student made a model of the JWST with its many hexagonal mirror segments, and became something of an expert at constructing them over this time period). That was actually really cool—practical geometry! You can also see the legs fully painted drying next to my elbow.

I then cut out some wedges to represent the fact that the platform isn't a monolithic slab, but instead has a lot of negative space to cut down on weight. This was a slow and finicky process, as whatever material the foam is made of it pretty bad at being cut with a razor blade. This problem was solved, however, at the next session…

…where Carolyn introduced me to a tool I affectionately call “The Lightsaber.” It's an incredibly simple design—I think she got it for $2—and I was completely skeptical of its utility at first, but after the first few seconds of trying it I became an instant convert. The design is simple: the two arms hold a thin wire between them, a C battery is inserted, and pushing a thumb button closes the loop and heats up the wire, allowing it to slice through Styrofoam like hot butter. Seriously, there's no discernible resistance when cutting Styrofoam with a fresh battery in the thing, which is a freaky feeling. The foam of the foam board proved slightly slower to cut, but still melts incredibly quickly. This made it really, really easy for me to cut foam to shape, and ended up being responsible for a surprising amount of the final model.

I also painted the platform and used a strip of flexible foam around the outside to make the outer edge. I was constantly surprised how much a difference the proper color made to my brain's acceptance of the model's fidelity…though in this case I realized a few days ago while looking at photos for reference that contrary to my memory the platform's actually white, not gray. Oh well, I think it looks better this way. (You can see a whole bunch of golden hexagons in the background that were part of the JWST model design process.)

One big issue I struggled with throughout March was how to make the conic base of the YTLA. I bought a large block of Styrofoam back at the beginning intending to cut out a cone and use that, but realized that would be very difficult to pull off. By April however Carolyn (the mentor for those of us doing models) had the idea to use a simple rectangular cube for the base, which I then decided to disguise with panels to make a low-resolution approximation to a circular cone. I realized that it didn't matter that much if the model were perfectly, 100% accurate, and settled for an octagonal cone in the end. (You can just see the Styrofoam block peeking out in this photo.)

By the end of April I'd added some support sticks around the outside and the safety fence around the working platform (though I haven't added the access stairs it has in reality), and you can see the beginnings of the panels around the base, not yet glued in place or fitted. Also, the exhibition was starting in less than two weeks and I was only starting to get finished!

Luckily, in our final weekly workshop I was able to get the structure finished, by carefully slicing the panels around the base to fit and gluing them in. Then it was just a matter of detail, so for several nights last week I stayed at uni far into the night, adding bits of machinery and equipment and wires and cables and all the little symmetry-breaking details that the real thing has.

And here it is, set up on its own little plinth in the gallery awaiting the opening day! I'm not 100% done with it yet—I'm planning to go in at lunch later this week and add a few more machinery bits and wires to the underside—but I'm basically happy with it now. It's at the point where it's essentially finished, there's just always more detail to add. Adding details is my favorite part of building things, and I wish I'd had a few more weeks to indulge in it, but still, it came out pretty well for the remarkably short time (according to Carolyn and Pam) that we had to put things together.

Here's a shot from the side, showing my attempts to mimic the chaotic vortex of cables of wires on the real thing. I didn't capture it by a long shot, but what's there definitely makes the whole thing seem so much more…well, maybe “alive” is the wrong word, but it definitely makes it look better.

So yeah, I'm going to be an actual exhibited artist in an exhibition and everything! (I should put this on my CV.) Not bad for an astrophysics grad student. It's almost like doing a mini-PhD in a way: working on a project under the guidance of a mentor, except I can envision the whole thing at once in my head, know where to go at all stages and what to work on next, make tangible progress each week…okay, so it's basically nothing like doing a PhD!

Pam and Carolyn have tossed around the idea of making the weekly art workshops a regular but more open-ended thing after the exhibition for those who want to attend, and it's quite an appealing idea. It's a great stress-reliever to be working on an art project along with other people, and those of us who stuck with it to the end have forged a real bond through helping each other out with supplies, knowledge, or just a helping hand. I've discovered a serious love of painting over the course of putting this model together, so maybe I'll try my hand at just doing that if this happens…

Anyway, if you'd like to come down to see my model, or the seriously impressive models and paintings of my fellow “arty astros” (as Carolyn was fond of calling us), stop by the Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn for the DEEPER DARKER BRIGHTER exhibition before the end of June!