Moon-painting

I've finished my second painting project, a picture of the waxing crescent Moon illuminated by Earthshine. This one only took about a month, compared to my first one which took three, for a few reasons:

1. This one is only 40x40 cm rather than 80x80 cm, or a quarter of the size of the first one.
2. It uses a much more restricted palette (number of colors), mostly because:
3. It's based on an actual astrophoto someone else took that I used as reference.

In fact it would have been finished even sooner, but for the SciCoder workshop last week leaving me no time to paint until Saturday. Still, it's finished now, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I only have one in-progress photo for this one; partly I forgot to take more, partly I chose not to because there often weren't significant differences between painting sessions.

You may be able to pick out, in the still un-painted areas, the pencil marks I sketched as a guide.

Here it is in progress, after two sessions; the first one I painted the sunlit side and maria (dark lava plains) there, and the second I started filling in the dark side highlands. It was interesting doing this one because I used a very restricted palette; white, black, gray, and one or two different types of blue.

And here's the finished product. I think this one looks a bit better from a distance, hence the wider shot of it hanging up in my kitchen. (The house I'm living in, very conveniently, has a ton of ready-made hooks for hanging things all over the walls.)

North is up in the painting so this is roughly how it'd look in the northern hemisphere, partly because I'm used to seeing it that way and partly because that's how the photo I painted it from looked. But you could easily flip it upside down to have a southern hemisphere view.

Anyway, it was a fun project, and interesting to paint with a restricted range of colors. I've already got several ideas in my head for future paintings, so we'll see which ones come to fruition first. Two weeks ago I discovered that the local art shop (where I'm now on a first-name basis with several of the employees) sells little 8×10 inch canvases by the 10-pack, so I've picked up one of those and have some Christmas presents to start painting… A hui hou!

A Thanksgiving Astrobite!

In a funny coincidence, when the latest three-month schedule for Astrobites was put together I ended up being scheduled for both Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. I got my Thanksgiving post up two days ago, and amusingly the title (“Mirach’s Ghost and Mirach’s Goblin: A New Galaxy Found Near the Local Group”) sounds a bit like I mis-scheduled a post intended for Halloween.

I'd actually intended to write this post for the queue and write about a different paper for my scheduled Thanksgiving post, but I ended up being extremely busy this week (details below) and since I'd already started working on this post I ended up using it instead. Oh well. Maybe I'll write the other one up for the queue. The paper I ended up writing about is fascinating in its own right, about the discovery of a new, extremely faint dwarf galaxy just beyond the boundary of the Local Group.

The reason I was so busy this week is that I was attending SciCoder 2018, an intensive week-long workshop in scientific programming. This was, however, an almost-literally last-minute decision, as the course had filled up so quickly upon being announced a few months ago that I only made it on the waiting list (and knew there was at least one other person who was on it ahead of me). Sunday night at about 7:30 PM I got an email from the conference organizer letting me know there was an opening and asking if I wanted to attend, and after half an hour or so of working out just how much that would impact my week I accepted.

And when I say intensive, it was just that; 9 to 5 each day (or 8:30 on the first day), at the University of Melbourne (necessitating an hour of train and tram travel for me each way), and throughout a veritable avalanche of information. I was fortunate to already have some familiarity with some of the concepts presented, and even I left each evening feeling like I'd just spent the day doing the mental equivalent of drinking out of a fire hose. It was good, don't get me wrong, but also quite exhausting.

Somehow during the week I also managed to squeeze out enough time (not that it took much) to work on a little personal project: Astrobites has had an offer, through its parent association the American Astronomical Society, for a logo revamp by a professional design firm. In place of the current logo which uses a photograph of Mars (with a bite taken out of it), one of the concepts they've provided was a stylized representation of Mars (with a bite taken out of it).

I'm a huge sucker for stylized representations of things, and liked the general idea, but there were a few details of the proposal that I wasn't 100% satisfied with so I quickly made a slightly different version of my own based on their template to illustrate the shortcomings I saw…and then had a fanciful idea to make a whole solar system of stylized-planets-with-bites-out for logos. I've got enough experience with Inkscape now that it only took me an hour or two, and I really like how it came out (as did a few fellow students when I showed them).

At this point I've changed Mars enough that the only thing I'm really copying from the proposal is the “bite and crumbs” motif each planet has. I doubt these will show up in an official capacity, so I thought I'd show them off here as a personal project. That's it for today though, I need to go catch up on my sleep now. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 8: 2015

Previously in this series of posts, covering 2014, I had some panoramas from the top of Mauna Kea to where it disappears into the ocean. In contrast, 2015 might just be The Year of Ocean Panoramas…

March

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In March of 2015 my friend Graham and I went for a hike at a little forest reserve up the Hāmākua coast called Kalōpā State Recreation Area, and while I didn't get any good panorama opportunities in the forest, on the way we stopped at Laupāhoehoe Point, a little spit of land sticking out of the craggy coast where you can access the ocean.

View looking east-south-east along the Hāmākua coast.

It's a lovely area, and we had some spectacular weather for the visit; being on the windward side of the island it's likely clouded over or raining much of the time.

May

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Nā Pali cliffs, near Kīlauea, looking south-east.

Interestingly I don't remember exactly what this trip was. I know the location: it's at the top of the steep cliffs (pali) between Kīlauea and the ocean, yet I don't remember why Graham and I came there or what we did for the rest of the trip, since these are almost the only photos I have from that day. We'd come earlier in the month to see the lava lake in Kīlauea, but here we were apparently just hiking? Apparently we didn't go to Kīlauea Iki or anything else like that, or I would've gotten photos of it. I think we stopped near here to have lunch, or something like that. It is a mystery.

Regardless, this panorama definitely hasn't been shown before. I vaguely remember of that trip that there was a lot of poor weather around; you can see that on both sides of the picture there are dark storm clouds, but we were lucky to have clear skies above us when this was taken.

June

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I don't actually have any panoramas specifically from June, but that month I noticed that panoramas make great desktop wallpaper for a dual-monitor display, and it could almost be considered the point where I realized that I'd been doing them for a while and started to get more intentional (albeit slowly) about looking for panorama opportunities.

July

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July, however, has several panoramas due to my mother's side of the family having a reunion in Oregon which I attended. We stayed right on the beach and explored a few locations up and down the coast as well.

This panorama and the next were taken relatively close to each other, the first looking north, the second looking south along the coast. The first and third of this series of four have shown up before on this blog, but the second and fourth are new, as I only put their constituent photos together into a panorama with Hugin.

I'm not sure why I never put these photos into a panorama, but my guess would be that due to the Sun's strong reflections in the middle of the scene the color correction would've been beyond my skill to do manually. Luckily, Hugin handles varying color composition throughout a panorama quite nicely and can compensate for it automatically to a pretty good extent.

These two panoramas above and below show Simpson's Reef; the lower one just from a slightly wider angle, which is likely why I never bothered putting it together after creating the first one.

I don't remember much about the reef from the little informational placard that was posted by the lookout, but I remember that the largest island in it was almost completely covered in sea lions (though they're hard to make out at this scale).

And that's it for 2015! A fairly slow year in terms of quantity, but some pretty nice panoramas. Looking ahead, 2016 will be similarly slow, but it's got some interesting ones that I haven't shown off before. A hui hou!