How to Paint A (Specific Spectral Class of) Star

I said in my previous post that I don't like revealing projects in progress, but my current project is so cool that I can't resist. Plus, it's more like a series of projects so I don't mind revealing one that I've completed.

I've decided to do a series of seven paintings of the various spectral types of stars. I'm only doing main sequence stars for now, as this allows me to paint them all to scale and I love those kinds of visual comparisons. (People keep asking me about other types of stars such as white dwarfs or supergiants, and my response has been a firm “We'll see.” I can't really paint those to the same scale so I don't think I'd be able to do them justice, but perhaps something will come up.)

This past Wednesday I painted the second star in the series, a B-type star, and had the idea of filming the process to make a time lapse video of it. It came out so well that I decided to add some commentary explaining my creative process, since it's informed by things like thermodynamics and stellar structure (while still retaining a fair amount of artistic license, of course).

Anyway, here's the video! Painting while conscious of being filmed was an interesting challenge, but I think the finished product is pretty good. Enjoy!

Healesville Sanctuary Trip the Second

Well, it's been nearly a month since my family departed back to California and things have mostly settled back into a familiar routine. I was a bit trepidatious about getting back to work on my research after a month away, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy to pick up where I'd left off; I think the re-writing of my code I've been doing after the SciCoder workshop in November has paid off with more easily-understandable and maintainable code. Our weekly art workshops at Swinburne have resumed and I've gotten back into painting regularly again; I've picked up a bunch of new paint and painting supplies and I've got several exciting projects in progress and ideas for several more, but I'm going to wait till they're finished before showing them off here so that'll be a post for another time!

For today, though, I have a few pictures from the trip we took to Healesville Sanctuary:

Here's one of an endangered Regent Parrot eating out of a dish I'm holding in one of the several aviaries at the sanctuary.

And here's a Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo!

This is an echidna, something I don't remember seeing in my trip to the sanctuary last year. This one was pretty funny, as for the entire time we watched it never stopped waddling around its enclosure (for what reason we were unable to determine).

And finally, me with some native Australian fauna I found in the gift store on the way out.

I've got a lot more pictures to go through so there are more coming, and hopefully I'll have the next ones up with less of a wait in between. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 9: 2016

I originally wrote this post to go up at the end of December, and had it all ready to go, then forgot to actually post it. Then January flew by in a whirl with my family around, and I've finally got enough time to see about properly posting it.

In the previous post in this series, 2015 was a pretty slow year for me regarding panoramas, having only made a total of six and concentrating them into two months of the year. 2016 was a more varied year, where I still only made seven panoramas but spread them out more evenly to about one a month.

February

---

Mauna Kea summit, from the entrance of the JCMT.

February's panorama is a common theme, the summit of Mauna Kea. This is taken from just outside the entrance of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, looking from north to east. You can see all the telescopes on the mountain at the time except for the Submillimetre Array (off to the left), the JCMT (behind me), and the Very Long Baseline Array radio dish further down the mountain.

March

---

West end of Puʻu Huluhulu.

I'm pretty sure this is a panorama, based on the file size and perspective effects. (It's definitely not one I assembled out of multiple photos, so I'm thinking it's from my phone camera.) I posted almost this exact picture, except cropped, in a post from 2016. This is the west end of Puʻu Huluhulu, a small eruptive cinder cone near the start of the Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa access roads. I took this picture because I was interested in seeing how the overlying volcanic “crust” had been thrust up by the explosion that created the puʻu, which I talk about more in the linked post.

May

---

I never uploaded this panorama before because it didn't turn out all that great—the Sun's flaring on the left and it's pretty dark in places otherwise. It's from a park pretty close to my house in Hilo, where what I think is a little offshoot of the Wailuku river flows serenely by. Some of the foliage, especially in the center foreground, is captured pretty nicely at least, even if the overall contrast range didn't work out too well.

June

---

Experimenting with getting a good contrast range was the theme for June, as I took three panoramas with my phone camera, all from atop Puʻu Kalepeamoa looking up towards Mauna Kea at sunset:

The first one came out way too dark, as the camera focused on exposing the white clouds and blue sky.

The second one came out better. The clouds are blown out now, but you can still see a bit of blue in the sky while simultaneously being able to make out details in the shadowed areas.

The third one swung a bit too far into overblown territory, though at least the detail in the shadowed areas can be seen quite clearly now!

While writing this post I had an idea to see if I could somehow merge the three together to get an image with high dynamic range, but unfortunately the perspective shifts enough between them that it's impossible to get them to line up correctly.

July

---

In July I took a trip to a night market down in Puna the name of which I've unfortunately forgotten (“Uncle Roberts,” maybe?). It was located down by the beach, which allowed to get this…very strange looking panorama at sunset. No, that's not some distant tsunami causing the water on the horizon to bulge up like that, it's just what my phone camera made of it. Wish I'd been able to get a better panorama, as it was a nice rocky beach and a beautiful time of day, with the water all foamy on the strand.

September

---

In September I took another trip to Volcanoes National Park and hiked the Kīlauea Iki trail for the third time. As per tradition, I took a few panoramas while I was there:

The first is from my phone camera, and illustrates a problem I've often had trying to get pictures within the Kīlauea Iki crater. Namely, the lava rock is so dark black that it's really difficult to expose both it and the sky at once. I'm sure it's possible, but my phone camera wasn't able to pull it off. I never posted this panorama as I wasn't happy about it for that reason, but looking at it now I find I rather like it. Sure the sky's blown out, but the rest of it's actually a pretty good representation of Kīlauea Iki from the eastern end.

The other panorama is one of the more rare vertical ones, and this one is hand-created from a few photos I took with my DSLR. (I've found Hugin doesn't necessarily handle these vertical ones that well.) This area is at the foot of the mountain of cinder and rock on the south-western edge of the crater, where the lava erupted from. I'm not sure why it's so much greener than the rest of the crater floor; perhaps water channels or pools here better? Or since it's more cinder and less unbroken rock, it's easier for plants to get a roothold? Whatever the reason, it's a little oasis of green in the black rocky desert.

And that's it for 2016 panoramas! In 2017 I get my second job working at over a mile high, so there will be some really nice panoramas, though it'll still be about the same number overall. A hui hou!

A Painting of Squeaky Beach

It's been a quiet month here on the blog (happy 2019 by the way), because it's been a busy month for me: my entire family came to Melbourne to visit for two weeks, and I've been back and forth over quite a lot of Victoria during that time! I've got a lot of pictures (and some videos) that will take some time to sort through, which should mean content for a whole series of posts in the weeks to come.

I'll just put this one up for now, a picture of a painting I was inspired to make of Squeaky Beach at Wilsons Promontory, a peninsula at the southernmost tip of the Australian mainland:

“Squeaky Beach” (Named for the sound the sand makes. A late Christmas gift for my sister and brother-in-law.)

It was a pretty neat beach, but I'll probably discuss it more later, so for now, just admire that ocean! I'm pleasantly surprised at just how well it came out, how dynamic it appears. I used a number of different shades of blue, blue-green, and even purple to try to help capture that continuously varied color the sea has. Also I think the seagulls—of which there were many at the beach—came out pretty cute, too (if such a thing can be said of seagulls).

I really enjoy watching the waves crash against the beach and trying to capture that makes for a fascinating painting challenge, so I can definitely see myself coming back to such scenes in the future. Anyway, that's enough for now, as tomorrow it's back to grad student life! A hui hou!

Happy 2019! Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou!

Well here it is, 2018's just about over and 2019's just around the corner. A year spent in Australia, a year spent below the equator—and now that I'm west of the international date line instead of east I get to welcome the new year before most of the world instead of after it. (Which means this post is going to go up the day before for people in the U.S. Oh well. That's time zones for you.)

And I'm off to a New Year's party now, so see you all in 2019! Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou!

A Christmas Eve Astrobite

I've put up a final post on Astrobites this year, on Christmas Eve, of all days! Especially after posting one on Thanksgiving. This is actually the post I wanted to write for Thanksgiving, but time constraints and the fact I already had one half-written changed that.

This paper is about how our Sun is so incredibly stable in brightness over time compared to other stars. In fact, its variability is so much lower than other stars that it's been a long-standing puzzle in solar physics. To explain it briefly, the authors of the paper I wrote about did some simulations of Sun-like stars while varying a few key parameters such as the proportion of elements besides hydrogen and helium and the star's effective temperature. What they found is that the Sun sits in a very special place in phase-space where it ends up being almost perfectly constant in brightness over the course of its solar magnetic cycle. Changing the metallicity or temperature by extremely small amounts (relatively speaking)—in any direction—causes the variability over a star's magnetic cycle to shoot up dramatically.

(The mechanism I thought was pretty interesting: magnetic activity in stars causes two types of phenomena, starspots which are darker than average, and faculae which are brighter than average. Most stars are dominated by one or the other over the course of a magnetic cycle which changes their brightness, but the Sun's parameters cause the relative numbers of sunspots and faculae to almost perfectly balance in such a way that its average power output as seen from Earth is almost constant.)

This is actually final astrobite as a scheduled author; going into my second year of my PhD I've decided to retire from the active rotation to be able to focus more on my research. However, I'm not done writing just yet! I'll be able to write posts for the queue, and I still intend to, which just means I won't know when they'll go out. I no longer need to write one every month or so, so the number may go up or down depending on how many interesting papers I come across. Honestly, that's the part I'm looking forward to the most: some of my posts were on papers I found genuinely fascinating and loved explaining and I'm really proud of them, while a few of them were written just because I had a deadline and were the most interesting least boring papers I could find recently. Being able to write only when I'm really motivated (kinda like I do here…) is quite an exciting prospect!

I feel like that may have ended up more melancholy than I intended, so how about some Christmas presents? For the featured image for my posts I used the painting below, which I painted last Thursday as a present for my adviser:

“A Solar Twin,” by me.

(Unfortunately I miscalculated when he was going on vacation so he'll find it when he gets back in January, I guess. Some of my friends were ribbing me that I'm setting unrealistically high expectations for the other students now!)

Painting a star turned out to be so much fun that I painted another one the next night, a pulsar for my associate adviser:

“A Pulsar,” also by me.

Ignore the ugly shadow cast by my easel at the top of the picture. Which, I realized, I haven't mentioned yet, so yes, I bought an easel! I feel like a real artist now. An easel makes painting so much easier. I picked one that's quite portable and folds up nicely so I can bring it home (as I've done over the break, along with my painting supplies). It's sitting in the corner with my current work on it, and I must say, an easel with a painting in progress on it really classes up the room it's in!

Anyway, that's enough for tonight. Merry Christmas everyone, and I hope to be back with some more posts soon now that I'm on vacation.

A December Update

It's been pretty quiet on the ol’ blog front this month—for a few reasons—but I'm hopeful that'll change in the next week or so. First off, I got sick last weekend, which laid me out for almost a week. Then, I've been struggling with a lot of instability in my computer the past few months, which I finally tracked down to one of my RAM modules starting to fail. I found and removed it last weekend, and my computer's been nice and stable again since. And finally, I've just been busy with numerous things as the end of the year rolls around.

This is the last week before the Christmas break begins, and I'll be taking a few weeks off after that, so I'm hoping that starting this weekend I can finally start working on some of the many creative projects rattling around in my head that have been accruing the last few months. And that'll likely lead to some new blog posts, so the second half of December should be a little livelier than the first half has been so far. Blender just came out with a huge new update that radically overhauls the interface to make it simpler and more intuitive, and I'm interested in checking it out to see how it's changed. Plus I've got plenty of other ideas for projects to do. A hui hou!

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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!