Painting the JCMT

While at home these past few months, I've been a bit constrained in my painting by a lack of painting materials (namely, I don't have a very wide array of colors with me—most of my paint is still at my desk in Swinburne, and will be there for at least the next month-and-a-half—and I also didn't have much canvas with me when the first lockdown started). However, I did have a canvas in progress which I started near the end of last year, of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope where I used to work from 2013–2016. Thankfully, it didn't require a wide variety of colors, and I'd already blocked in about half of it back in November (based on the only in-progress picture of it I could find), though I took a few months' break from it after that. I've been working on it slowly off and on over the course of the lockdown(s), and I finally finished it last week.

“James Clerk Maxwell Telescope,” acrylic on canvas, 14×18”.

I based this off a photo taken by a college friend of mine who was a telescope operator at the JCMT for a few years, contemporaneously with me. If you're not familiar with the JCMT, it's a telescope which detects light in the sub-millimeter wavelength range, between infrared and radio waves. The dish itself sits behind the large Gore-Tex membrane in the world, which is the area in the middle of the painting with the contour lines. (The Gore-Tex is essentially invisible at sub-millimeter wavelengths, so it doesn't block the observations.)

(Incidentally, getting the contour lines to look not-wrong may have been the hardest part of the painting, as I painted them on only to realize they looked wrong at least twice. The membrane has a somewhat complicated shape, so I ended up drawing them on with pencil so I could more easily change them, and after several weeks of adjusting them they're at least approximately correct.)

Another neat fact about the JCMT is that the SCUBA-2 sub-millmeter camera (which I worked with primarily, though on the quality assurance side) is the coldest place in the known universe: the detector is kept at a working temperature of just 70 millikelvins above absolute zero. This is because the detector has to be colder than what it's observing to prevent swamping the observation with thermal noise, and sub-millimeter light comes from extremely cold gas and dust, on the order of a few to tens of kelvins.

Anyway, that's one of the things I've been working on lately. I'd like to do another painting of the other telescope I've worked at (the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array) on the last canvas I have with me, but as I only just started that this week it probably won't be done anytime soon (though it's also a much smaller canvas, so we'll see). Maybe I can start a series of “Observatories I Have Worked At.” And maybe in the future, it'll contain more than two paintings! Who knows? A hui hou!