Lava Hits the Beach

After waiting 5 years for just the right conditions, photographers CJ Kale and Nick Selway made this fascinating video of their adventure photographing lava flowing into the sea at the Kalapana ocean entry about 30 miles south of Hilo, Hawaii.




When I visit the Big Island, I plan to stop by the Lava Light Galleries in Kailua-Kona. You may want to check out their online SmugMug galleries to see photos by CJ Kale and photos by Nick Selway. You can learn more about these excellent and daring nature photographers from the Lava Light Galleries Blog.

FITS Liberator Image from 03h32m29.3s, -27d44m10.0s (J2000)

This is an image I created today using the FITS Liberator with data obtained from SkyView. What you're seeing is an area of deep space that was surveyed by the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (HST ACS). I got the FITS data by giving SkyView the coordinates 03h32m29.3s, -27d44m10.0s (J2000 co-ordinate system) and specifying regions .02 degrees in size.

To get a color image, I downloaded three sets of FITS data, each covering the same area of space, but with different filters for wavelength. Using the FITS Liberator, I converted each data set into a TIFF image. I then loaded the TIFF images in to Adobe Photoshop to make a stack of three layers and gave a different color (i.e. red, green, blue) to each layer. After making some curves adjustments, I got the image you see above.

Making this image involved a series of subjective judgements, first in managing the dynamic ranges of images with the FITS Liberator, and then in tweaking curves in Photoshop. So the image you see should be considered an artistic rendering of astronomical data rather than a "snapshot" of outer space. I did, however, try to keep the colors basically "natural" by assigning blue to the shortest frequency filter, red to the highest frequency, and green to the one in the middle.

When looking at my image, you may be wondering if there's a way to describe the part of space it shows other than by the coordinates I've provided. I was wondering that too, at first!  I've never taken a class in astronomy, and I understand less than half of what I read on the subject. However, I'm fascinated by astrophotography. So my approach to learning about astronomy has been to find interesting images and then try to understand what they show. If you're an astronomy buff, you may know what my image shows. Otherwise, you're going to have to wait for me to post more information.

The Art of Mario Mariotti

In going through photographs with my mother, I saw she had downloaded some striking images of hands painted to look like animals. These are the work of an Italian artist, Mario Marriotti (1936-1997), with photography by Roberto Marchiori.

Mario Mariotti was an experimental and conceptual artist who lived and worked in Florence. He began to experiment with painting his own hands in the late 1960's.  Animani, which was published in 1980, shows the colorful representations of animals Marriotti created with his hand art. Subsequent books include Umani, Rimani, Humands, Hanimations, Hand Games, and Hands Off.

Photographs of Mariotti's work also were on display at an exhibition, Animani, from November 29, 2009 through April 11, 2010 at the Instituto degli Innocenti in Florence.  This exhibition was curated by Stefano Filipponi, Francesca Mariotti, Gianni Pozzi and Andrea Rauch, and included workshops showing children how to re-create Mariotti's hand characters

In learning about Mariotti, I discovered a collaborative art project he organized in which the citizens of Florence were invited to submit images which were projected onto the exterior of the Santo Spirito during a performing arts festival.  You can see some of the striking results in  Santo Spirito Projections at the website Fictional Cities.

For your enjoyment, I've provided a slideshow of photographs by Roberto Marchiori of Marriotti's body art.

Astrophotography with FITS Liberator

Modern astronomical telescopes save their raw data in a format known as FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). The colorful images we see from space are created by transforming FITS imaging data into a standard graphical format, such as TIFF, to create a set of files that can be imported into an image editing application such as Photoshop or GIMP. If you know how to use image editing software, you can create your own "pretty pictures" of astronomical subjects by obtaining FITS files (available from a number of sources) and using the FITS Liberator to transform them into TIFF images.

FITS Liberator, developed by ESA/ESO/NASA, was originally a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop.  With the release of version 3, the open-source FITS Liberator has become a stand-alone application, with versions available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Using FITS data I obtained from NASA's virtual observatory, SkyView, I created the above image of M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy.  There are no doubt better images of M51 around, but this one is uniquely mine. Creating it was a fun learning experience.

You can learn more about FITS data and how to obtain it from The FITS Support Office
at NASA/GSFC and from Image Processing Resources for Astronomy Teaching by by the Astronomy Education Committee of the American Association of Physics Teachers.