For the month of October, I'm participating in the annual #inktober drawing challenge. I'll be following some of the official Inktober prompts, but mostly the SciArt Inktober prompts. I will also be giving up my colorful inks and restricting myself to black ink.
Today, I'm following the #SciArtInktober prompt "lipid" and drawing some phospholipids.
Want to know what my research is about? Follow this thread 🧵 based on a 10min talk I've drawn for a meeting.
The talk was aimed at non-specialist space science colleagues (not the general public!). The slides were built up step by step, but I'm omitting this here & showing only the final graphs, less this becomes a 34-part thread. 11 is plenty enough!
So: "Understanding Winds of Massive Stars Using High Mass X-ray Binaries"
1/16 This July, I gave an invited talk in the "Communicating Science Through Art" session at the European Astronomical Society annual meeting, organized by the amazing @theastrophoenix . And I thought it may be something that would also interest you #fediverse folks.
The aim of the talk was partly to give people insight into my why & how of my art. But mainly to encourage others to just try. In a very subjective manner.
Here the key slides - not art-sy, but hopefully useful for some folks!
And unsurprisingly it feels super vulnerable to talk very subjectively about my art practice and about my insecurities (but also so important in order to encourage others!).
Where we use a method originally used for AGN to answer the question whether
we can use variability in individual X-ray lines to probe the variable stellar wind.
And the answer is: yes, we can!
The paper (submitted not yet refereed) is:
"Stellar wind variability in Cygnus X-1 from high-resolution excess
variance spectroscopy with Chandra" by Härer et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14201
Happy birthday to #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery that angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.
She found 6 months mat leave post MSc very difficult being
1/n
💪 I'm ever so slightly proud, because I've been procrastinating on updating my website for over a year. But now I finally have a proper link to mastodon (yay verification! - but it took ages to figure out how to update the template so I have the mastodon icon & not break everything), updated list of current members of my group, info on research visitor funding aaaaaand 8 new #SciArt doodles:
"Stay curious!" Today I experimented with this prototype of a portable pocket shrine or lucky charm. The piece can be hung open on the wall or carried as a small bag, or even worn around the neck with a ribbon. Inspired by 19th century #Breverl, by art books, amulets, old meditation pictures, and cabinets of curiosities. Could there be people who buy such things? 🤔
Starting today I will post a page of my "Good Night(sky) Stories" each #Moonday. It's a visual journey through our solar system and beyond, combining cute cartoons with scientific facts and trite humor. Basically the result of an artist and an astrophysicist distracting themselves during boring meetings.
German version: https://mastodon.art/@eyeling/109501818170699384 #sciart#scicomm#astronomy#astrodon
Over the years, I've played with code and particle systems to create art. In the systems I develop, each particle has an atomic number and interacts with other particles based on their atomic numbers. In various ways, they 'draw' when they collide.
In this piece, I'm combining one of these particle systems with the Fibonacci system.
The end result? Looks a bit like a quilt, I think.
Recently, I've been experimenting with new versions of my Generative Nerves series and exploring more color combinations. I love how they look, all together like this.
These are still a work in progress. My first test prints, on aluminum, showed me that I still had some work to do on them before they're just right.
One of the best thing that happened in dinosaur paleontology is discovering the rest of the body of the used-to-be mysterious Deinocheirus. Until then only the giant arms were known.
Giant camel duck is something nobody expected and I love that.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who revolutionized our understanding of what stars & the Universe are made of, was born #OTD in 1900.
In 1926, she wrote what is considered the "undoubtedly most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
She continued in the same spirit - only to be denied a professorship (or even the a proper astronomer position). She finally became a professor at Harvard at 1956(!) & first woman to chair a department.
#SciArt is a human activity, but often #nature itself provides the brushes and pigments.
Last year the South African Radio #Astronomy Observatory released a stunning view of the core of the #MilkyWay captured by the MeerKAT radio #telescope
Here's my edited version, where the colours map the so-called spectral index, which tells us what causes the radio emission. Those filaments do look like brush strokes, don't they?
We are celebrating Christmas at partner's parents with the same raclette grill as 20 years ago - which is pretty impressive, but not quiet as much as the Voyager spacecrafts 😅 Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 - still working, still teaching us new things about the most external parts of the solar system.
With many thanks to @schnedan for the idea to draw Voyager :)
Another pattern of invertebrates for #InverteFest2024 but this time from the Cambrian Period (from 538.8 to 485.4 million years ago). This pattern is made from my linocut animal prints with collaged washi papers. The spiky handprinted Wiwaxia, a soft-bodied animal covered in scales & spines lived in the early & middle Cambrian period and fossils are found worldwide, including in Canada’s Burgess Shale.
🧵1/n #linocut#printmaking#pattern#paleontology#sciArt#Cambrian
Happy birthday to founder of modern nursing, social reformer, statistician, data visualization innovator & writer Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910)!
Nightingale earned the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" during the Crimean War, from a phrase used by The Times, describing her as a “ministering angel” making her solitary rounds of the hospital at night with “a little lamp in her hand”. 🧵1/n
#linocut#printmaking#sciart#womenInSTEM#datavis#nursing#statistics#mathart#MastoArt