Pleiades

It's been my habit these days to take one day off from trumpet practice per week, and today was one of those respites. Before I knew the weather forecast, I'd fantasized about heading off to one of the metro parks, or even the Cuyahoga Valley for some long walking, but since we got a fresh heap of residual winter last night, I decided instead to make the best of things at home.

The latest addition to my astronomical drawing project had been lying dormant for a couple weeks. After finishing Accretion, I'd ridden the excitement and started another drawing right away...a smaller one that I hoped wouldn't take me nearly as long. A little ways into the work however, I ran into some creative road blocks and frustratedly set it aside. I'd walk past it every day...look at it for a while...maybe fill in a minor detail or two...and then, just as frustrated, walk away again. After a certain point it just didn't seem to flow. I'd lost the original vision somewhere, and was left scratching my head over what to do next.

So today...left with few options with which to occupy the hours...I loaded up some podcasts (Science Friday, This American Life, and Radio West) and set to work. I figured I'd just muscle through and hope it would start to make sense at some point. Not the most ideal creative frame of mind I suppose, but sometimes you just gotta do it.

With a little coaxing and last-minute improvisation, it seems the result isn't half bad...an expressive and abstract elaboration on the Pleiades star cluster...

As I may have said on previous occasions, The Pleiades has been a favorite object of mine since before I knew there were such things as open star clusters. I saw it first from the back seat car window during a childhood trip to visit my grandparents in North Dakota. While absent-mindedly gazing up into the dark sky, I was puzzled and intrigued by a little fuzzy patch that eventually resolved itself into what I thought looked like (and this is immediately what I labeled it in the back of my young mind) an "itsy-bitsy-teeny-weenie-yellow-polka-dot -bikini dipper". I smiled and adopted the little patch of stars as my own personal secret constellation...though, of course, I eventually came to find out that it is widely known and much beloved.

I want to reiterate that the drawings in this series are not meant to represent reality in any precise or scientific manner. Though I did use a detailed star map to place most of the "stars" you see in the work, and referenced many astro-photos while adding aspects of nebulosity, my motivation behind all of these works is only to express the sense of the rapture I've felt while viewing the night sky. The astronomical wonders that surround us (whether viewable to the unaided eye, through binoculars or telescopes, or invisible to all but technologies that gather data in wavelengths beyond human perception), and the true stories of creation and cosmic evolution that surround them, inspire my imagination.

Pancake Corona

Sometimes art sneaks up on you...appearing unexpectedly out of the most mundane of circumstances.

While cleaning up after a pancake breakfast yesterday, I absentmindedly fiddled with the little drops of cooked batter still stuck to the griddle, and ended up with this little sculpture...if you can call it that.

It reminded me first of the Coronas Australis and Borealis: near twin half loops of stars best seen on a clear summer night. Looking again it is a string of pearls that--if I give my imagination a real stretch--appears to recede infinitely into the dark oily tarnish of the griddle.

Guffaw if you like. I'm definitely not the first to explore the aesthetic side of this traditional breakfast fare.

Winter Aconite 2

Another few days of snow, and still going strong...

Virtual Sunsets

One of my favorite ways to doodle away time on the internet is to participate in research based crowdsourceing activities. In particular, I've donated many hours of my free time (which, at the moment, I have in abundance...knock on wood) to various Zooniverse projects: I've identified, counted, and measured craters and other surface features on the moon and Mars, sought out and labeled cosmic bubbles, monitored the sun's surface for ejections of plasma, scanned the skies for distant galaxies and supernovae, and squinted out over the grassy plains of the Serengeti looking for wildlife. In addition to the coolness of getting to flip through images from all over the cosmos, the "busy work" that I and my online "colleagues" complete, often leads to the publication of real scientific papers, and it feels great to think that I've made some small contribution to humanity's search for knowledge. 

As many of you know, when I was a kid (long before I ever made a noise on a trumpet), I told anyone who asked that I wanted to grow up to be "and artist and a scientist," so when I came across a blog post about modern gallery installation involving crowdsourcing, my curiosity was piqued. 

On the surface, Tobias Klein's Virtual Sunset seems a little odd. Gallery visitors are invited to stroll through a hanging cascade of translucent PVC pipes through which light from hundreds of sunset photos create a play of color meant to convey the experience of one gigantic shared sunset. I'm not sure I entirely understand how the physical installation works, but I've found the online portion of the piece--through which all those global sunset pictures are procured--to be a lot of fun. 

Each time a visitor uploads a sunset photo to the project's website, in return they are emailed a composite sunset "mirage" made up of their photo in the center, the nearest sunset at the time of upload on the right, and a "live" sunset image on the left that changes each time you refresh your submission. Examples of my own email "postcards" are shown below...yes, that's right...I got obsessed enough that I uploaded 14 sunsets over the course of the day...I AM getting productive things done in my life...really, I PROMISE! 

If you've been around since I started my blog you may recognize some of the central images...

Taken on my first trip to the shore of Lake Eerie soon after I moved here...and someplace on the left that I couldn't begin to pronounce...

An evening drive through the Turtle Mountains to Dunseith...with African foliage...

Spray from Niagara...or is that blowing sand...floating through the air above Rio...

A surprisingly exotic view from my apartment in Holladay...

Niagara...with buffalo...

Sure can see a long way from my attic window...

Castle mountain in Graz...

Calm waters in Ithaca...and the Indian Ocean...

This one's kind of a mess...

A SLAS star party...

International Peace Towers...raised over more than one border...

Northwestern reflections...

Bryce Canyon...and a rising Southern star scape...

More hills and tall buildings than I ever expected to see in North Dakota...

It's fun to think that others who submit might get my sunsets merged with theirs, and that for the first time in my life, I'll have my photography displayed in a major gallery...sort of:) It's also interesting to watch my postcards change as sunset moves around the world, and I encourage you to submit sunset photos if you have them.

One thing to keep in mind (that is probably obvious to you, but took me--a tech idiot--a few tries to figure out) is that when you enter the image location into the google maps form on the project website, you can move the little red pin around to the exact spot you were when you took the photo. For example, I took the last photo in the string above at Kelly's Slough National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota. Well, Kelly's Slough doesn't come up in the location list, but knowing that it's a few miles west of Grand Forks on Highway 2, I just typed in "Grand Forks," and then moved the pin down the highway until I reached the right spot...which I then learned falls within the Blooming township. I guess I'm a little obsessive. Most people probably don't take the trouble.