I Liked the Picture Before It Was a Painting…

A few weeks ago I was browsing some of my old digital artwork, and came across the second piece I'd ever done. The first piece was pretty much the result of me discovering digital artwork and throwing a whole bunch of things together without a pre-set purpose, so this piece is what I consider my first “serious” attempt at realizing a vision. I thought for sure I'd posted it on this blog years ago, but a thorough search failed to turn it up, so for (what I think is) the first time, here's the image:

“Fictitious Solar System 2”

This is…uh, “Fictitious Solar System 2,” going by the file name. Yeah, names weren't exactly my strong suit back then. (Or maybe still!) As you can see by the date in the corner, I made this back in 2008, back when the number of known exoplanets wasn't yet in the thousands and they were still exciting and new. It's based on the common “Hot Jupiter” type of exoplanet, which made up a disproportionately large amount of the early exoplanets found simply because they're the easiest to find.

Hot Jupiters are a type of planet we don't have in our Solar System (and one no one predicted beforehand), where a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn orbits extremely close in to its host star, often having orbital periods measured in just a few days. (As a reminder, the closest planet to our Sun still takes 88 days to complete one revolution.)

In the picture, we see a red star with a gas giant in stark silhouette in front of it. Of course, it's actually a bit ambiguous: is this a red dwarf, main sequence star with a hot Jupiter orbiting extremely close in? Or could it be, perhaps, an ancient red supergiant which has left the main sequence, “at length, grown old and swell’d to bulk enormous,¹” and this planet is actually progressing on an orbit the size of Jupiter's? I don't actually remember my intent, so, uh, enjoy the ambiguity I guess!

Anyway, the actual point of this post is that it struck me, while looking at this picture, that it would make a pretty good painting, especially with the practice I've gotten in painting stars over the past few years. I actually still quite like the composition, though I won't copy it exactly. (I also like how, almost a dozen years ago now, I was already obviously having fun making the solar flares and prominences in the star's atmosphere.) I started painting the background for the painting version over the long Australia Day weekend last week, so watch for the painted version at some point in the future. A hui hou!

¹ –Nitocris, Belshazzar, Act 1, Scene 1.

Back to (Smokey) Melbourne

Well, I made it back to Melbourne safely last week, though I arrived to a rather different environment then I left: the smell of smoke was thick on the air, and making its presence known by the reduced visibility it was causing. We had a storm last Thursday which cleared it out (and some southerly winds over the weekend which helped keep it out), but by Monday this week it was starting to appear again, and Tuesday morning looked like this:

That's the train station near my house, and as you can see visibility was down to perhaps half a kilometer. Wednesday (yesterday) morning was like that as well, but thankfully a thunderstorm came through Wednesday afternoon and again cleared it out. (The forecast for next week looks pretty rainy, so hopefully it'll keep the smoke away and help with the fire fighting.)

Other than that I also started back up my research this week, and have been going through the process of figuring out what I was doing when I left off. I think I'm getting better at writing readable code, as it hasn't taken me long to get back to tinkering with it—in fact even my first day back I was making some fairly important improvements. I'm becoming keenly aware that I've got less than ten months left in my PhD, and need to get some results out soon. It's definitely getting there, at least, and I think it's now as much a matter of actually hammering out a first paper as continuing to analyze the data we have. But that's work for another day. Outside of work I've also taken up painting again, starting with this hilarious Christmas gift from my mother:

This is a rare case of me letting you see what I'm working on before it's done, so enjoy it while it lasts! No idea when it'll be finished, though I got a good start on it last night. But that's all for now, I think. A hui hou!