I wanted a picture to go with the disk that would capture as
many of the aspects of the Dobson style telescope as possible. Since these
telescopes are often used for star parties at schools I knew there should be
people of various ages in the picture.
The ‘French Impressionist’ school of
art
I have been attending the ‘Music of the Spheres’ summer concerts at
Lick Observatory for many years and it occurred to me that the early days of
Lick Observatory were coincident with the French Impressionist Movement in
France. This connection has never been made before so far as I know. One of
the Impressionists Artists was Georges Seurat. Paintings by Seurat were
created by the use of tiny dots of paint on the canvas. This was known as
‘Pointillism’. Colors displayed in this way are additive, unlike mixed paint pigments.
Colors of green and blue add
to cyan rather than subtract to blue green. Red and green add to yellow
rather than subtract to brown. The equivalent of this painting using a
computer is ‘pixel’ painting. A photograph
scanned into the computer is presented with pixels. The more pixels per
centimeter and the more possible colors per pixel the better the reproduction can be.
Oh, but we know that the Impressionists were able to paint beautiful
pictures using relatively few points of paint and sometimes with only two or
three colors. So then it should be possible to paint beautiful pictures on
the computer screen.
Needing some starting point, I loaded my 12 inch telescope and my
Polaroid Camera into the truck for the trip to the concert. The picture
taken by one of the other guests shows me looking through the scope. I took
some care that the sun would not strike the mirror as the cardboard tube
would have been set afire very quickly. This photo along with a second
showing the distant coast range mountains in the background supplied the
model for the background and for the person at the telescope (me). A week or
so later it was off to the library to look at books of French Impressionist
painting. I found the two boys in the Paris Street Scene by Renoir.
Is the Boy explaining the size of the Eiffel Tower, stretching bubble gum
or pointing to some object on the celestial sphere? I prefer to presume the
latter. The lady in green was another Renoir. Originally in white she was
far too large and had far too many pixels.
The Little Girl in blue is in the
far ground of a painting by Toulouse Lautrec. Try as I may I am unable to
find this painting again. The picture took about two months plus another two
weeks fussing with the animation and the late twilight version. The pattern
on the paving was originally a checker board. While stretching a caricature
to fit I noticed the interesting pattern and adopted it. I have noticed that
the paving pattern can be distinguished from the checkerboard on the
telescope from some distance. I attribute this gain of resolution to the
difference in the diffraction pattern caused by the different spatial frequencies of the two patterns.
The Astronomer is carrying a red flashlight
or laser pointer which seems to be blinking on and off. The Lady seems to be
walking away, I don’t know why. The Little Girl seems to be telling the
Lady to return to look at the Croissant Venus.
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There
are five other animations in the .gif picture. Three are on the
ground, two are in the sky. In the twilight version the twinkling of
the street lights in the Santa Clara Valley are the only animation.
Paint programs such as LView are able to combine and separate the frames of
these .gif animations.
