On Saturday I attended the afternoon session of Subtle Technologies. I always love that conference, even though its art/science amalgamation is sometimes awkward and goofy. The organisers, Jim Ruxton and Sachiko Hirosue, are really good at riding out the discomfort that arises from weird juxatopositions between the presenters. It's not a melding of minds, but a meeting of disciplines.
From The Hubble Space Telescope Gallery and Public Information, the caption on Jayanne English's website reads: "The radiation detected from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) not only includes light that our eyes would see, but also radiation from the infra-red and and ultra-violet which we do not see."
One of my favourite talks was by Jayanne English, who works on "outreach images" for astronomy. She was part of the Hubble team that composed and colourised data from the Hubble telescope into the sumptuous space images that we see in magazines. English talked a lot about the politics of translating data into colour choices that would be visually interesting to a general audience. She said she had to do quite a bit of "inreach" initially, training the astronomers to understand image theory. One big problem is that the light at the "hot" end of the spectrum is represented in science as blue, while the "cool" end is red. Scientists sometimes think their data is being misrepresented if she inverts this convention so it'll make sense to the rest of us who think red is hot and blue is cool. But making the images scientifically informative is an important part of the mandate. She said that she is not interested in representing data as the eye would see it, as that is not useful to the science, nor particularly interesting to look at, as most of the information is outside the visible spectrum anyhow.
Lately English has been working with data from radio telescopes, which, she says gives her more leeway. There's more info and images here on her website.
National Radio Astronomy Observatory Image Contest - First Prize 2006. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Jayanne English (U. Manitoba), Jeroen Stil and Russ Taylor (U. Calgary) and MSX. The caption on Jayanne English's website reads: "A Majestic Gas Shell Revealed by the VLA. -- This image, created by myself and Jeroen Stil with the support of Russ Taylor (U Calgary), shows cold hydrogen gas shell, GS 62.1+0.2-18, residing in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. One of the telescopes it uses is the VLA, the radio telescope array used in the movie Contact. Our eyes do not detect radiation so this gas is 'invisible' but very important to the formation of stars, planets and even life itself."
I'm tempted to give up art for her job.
Me too. She seems like a really neat person, very sparky and funny and not shy of saying it like it is. she'd be great to apprentice with.
It's her work and their PR team that has kept the Hubble functioning, without these images making us go ooooooh they would have stopped servicing it a while ago. As it stands there is one more maintainance scheduled that should keep it going until 2013 when they'll be sending up a new one.
I've recommended this book several times before and I'll do it one more time, The Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle over the Hubble Space Telescope
|
On Saturday I attended the afternoon session of Subtle Technologies. I always love that conference, even though its art/science amalgamation is sometimes awkward and goofy. The organisers, Jim Ruxton and Sachiko Hirosue, are really good at riding out the discomfort that arises from weird juxatopositions between the presenters. It's not a melding of minds, but a meeting of disciplines.
From The Hubble Space Telescope Gallery and Public Information, the caption on Jayanne English's website reads: "The radiation detected from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) not only includes light that our eyes would see, but also radiation from the infra-red and and ultra-violet which we do not see."
One of my favourite talks was by Jayanne English, who works on "outreach images" for astronomy. She was part of the Hubble team that composed and colourised data from the Hubble telescope into the sumptuous space images that we see in magazines. English talked a lot about the politics of translating data into colour choices that would be visually interesting to a general audience. She said she had to do quite a bit of "inreach" initially, training the astronomers to understand image theory. One big problem is that the light at the "hot" end of the spectrum is represented in science as blue, while the "cool" end is red. Scientists sometimes think their data is being misrepresented if she inverts this convention so it'll make sense to the rest of us who think red is hot and blue is cool. But making the images scientifically informative is an important part of the mandate. She said that she is not interested in representing data as the eye would see it, as that is not useful to the science, nor particularly interesting to look at, as most of the information is outside the visible spectrum anyhow.
Lately English has been working with data from radio telescopes, which, she says gives her more leeway. There's more info and images here on her website.
National Radio Astronomy Observatory Image Contest - First Prize 2006. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Jayanne English (U. Manitoba), Jeroen Stil and Russ Taylor (U. Calgary) and MSX. The caption on Jayanne English's website reads: "A Majestic Gas Shell Revealed by the VLA. -- This image, created by myself and Jeroen Stil with the support of Russ Taylor (U Calgary), shows cold hydrogen gas shell, GS 62.1+0.2-18, residing in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. One of the telescopes it uses is the VLA, the radio telescope array used in the movie Contact. Our eyes do not detect radiation so this gas is 'invisible' but very important to the formation of stars, planets and even life itself."
- sally mckay 6-02-2008 6:41 pm
I'm tempted to give up art for her job.
- L.M. 6-02-2008 7:13 pm
Me too. She seems like a really neat person, very sparky and funny and not shy of saying it like it is. she'd be great to apprentice with.
- sally mckay 6-02-2008 8:10 pm
It's her work and their PR team that has kept the Hubble functioning, without these images making us go ooooooh they would have stopped servicing it a while ago. As it stands there is one more maintainance scheduled that should keep it going until 2013 when they'll be sending up a new one.
I've recommended this book several times before and I'll do it one more time, The Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle over the Hubble Space Telescope
- L.M. 6-02-2008 8:44 pm