Using Art to Reveal Science in Astronomy Public Outreach Images

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.© Astron

After the success of the "Astronomy Pretty Poster Pageant" (see Daily Image 1/8/2014), another event was organised aimed for improving our skills of producing nice astronomical images (we seem to need this). In the week of Aug 25, we had Dr. Jayanne English visiting ASTRON giving a presentation and hands-on workshops on this topic. Jayanne is an Associate Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (Canada). All her career, she has intertwined art and astronomy: she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design before moving on to receive her B.Sc. in Astronomy from the University of Toronto, and then her PhD from the Australian National University in 1994.

As part of her work with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, she coordinated the Hubble Heritage project (http://heritage.stsci.edu/ ) and authored the Hubble Heritage website. She has been also very active during the International Year of Astronomy (2009), producing art work as well as an astronomy image-making video.

The visit of Jayanne to ASTRON has been fun but also extremely useful. In addition to the workshop, she has worked with some of us to apply her techniques and produce nice images from both WSRT and LOFAR data (some shown in the figure). She has also joined us during the AstroFest in Exloo. Jayanne really enjoyed the visit to LOFAR that we had during the AstroFest but she also gave a short "guest lecture" on the "making of" the pretty - but also explanatory - image of UGC 10288. This image was used for a press release of a paper involving also our George Heald (and posted also as our Daily Image of November 15 last year ).