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© JvL
In April we announced the first Fast Radio Bursts that Apertif discovered, in
a paper in A&A. As that is the kind of result that deserves dissemination to a wider audience we prepared
text and visuals to make our findings accessible. Above you can see some of the steps that led to the final movie, which was picked up world wide. Given that it's a 40 page (!) paper with many results, we first chose which topic to focus on; we concluded the new lines of sight through the M33 halo best explained the unique features of our ARTS/Apertif research. So, Joeri made a few sketches, and we chose the top-left one to start with. In a few iterations,
Danielle Futselaar then drew the scene as a 2D still in Photoshop (top right). Based on that, Joeri separated or redrew the elements, created a 3D scene in After Effects, and animated* the bursts, fly-through, and sound. This led to the final result
you can see here as stand-alone, and that, as it was distributed under a CC license, was included the video coverage of many news outlets.
* Those interested in such animations can check out our Pulsar Animation Website, where all the raw materials for previous animations are available.
© JvL