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Steve Crawford

@astrocrawford.bsky.social

Astronomer wandering through time and space. Likely to post about #Earth and #Space science especially #astronomy, Open Source Software, Open Science, and space. And hiking with our dog. Opinions are my own. He/him.

217 Posts1895 Follower1192 Folgt
Don Davis@ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 3d ago

51 years ago I painted a trio of Viking related works for NASA HQ including the widely reproduced one of the landing on Mars. I have reimagined the Landing portrayal in updated form using digital methods of visualization and painting. I chose the same angle but with reality replacing anticipation.

This oil painting portrays the Viking 1 landing on Mars, which appeared in countless publications. The story of this work is relayed in an earlier post and is shown here for comparison with the new portrayal of this very view, showing the event as it would have appeared. This 1975 anticipatory painting was done with oils on a gesso smoothed 16 X 20 canvas panel, using traditional art methods including a tracing paper guide featured earlier. This work shows in retrospect my ideal of the 'spirit of space art', showing something of a summary of what is known of the subject while conveying what it is about the subject's known or theorized attributes that I find visually compelling. The new digital painting updates that visual impression with one based on our current knowledge. The new digital work was also done at the same size as this one was for possible printing purposes, 16 by 20 inches at 300 DPI. #Sciart In 1976 the pair of Viking spacecraft orbiter/lander combos were sent to Mars. Before Viking, Mars was still largely a place of our imaginations, an unknown that we wrote stories about then studied from Earth and space. The dominance of cratered terrain on the portions of Mars photographed by Mariners 4, 6 and 7 gave an initially Lunar impression of that world, which changed during the development of the Viking lander after Mariner 9 revealed the planet. The first landing was aimed for a flat flood plain, judged as a decent place to search for life. The landing date was July 4, however the intended site appeared too rough for comfort in the high quality orbiter photos, causing the landing to wisely be delayed. A smoother site further 'down stream' was found using photo and radar data. The landing proceeded quite nominally, a magnificent achievement that apparently accounted for what it had to and made it the first time. The first photo from the surface was a look at a footpad to see how solid the 'footing' appeared. Then a moderate resolution panorama of the surroundings was obtained, first showing the rocks, hills, dunes-and bright sky. The latter was my biggest surprise as a space artist. The adjustments to the color balance of the later photos were gradually narrowed down. The ubiquitous dust is planet wide, suspended in the air and coloring the sky a luminous tan ochre. This digital painting shows the view a meter above the surface seeing the lander briefly kicking up dust less than a second before touchdown with the footpads 1.4 meters high. The landing rockets were designed with many nozzles to disturb the surroundings as little as possible. The nearby disturbed dust resembles in color that of the sky. We are 6 meters away from the center of the lander. field of view is 60 degrees, we are looking Northwest with the Sun and Earth off the frame to the left. This is a digital art update of the pre mission oil painting I did for NASA HQ 1n 1975. #Sciart
Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 4d ago

Another paper from our NASA-funded project on ferns has dropped! UWyoming MS student Fern (really!) Holian, developed a new schema for classifying fossil ferns, which are understudied. 🧪🌿☄️

Application of a novel schema for describing fossil fern foliage and investigating taxonomic and morphological change across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in western North America

Premise The Chicxulub asteroid impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary triggered a mass extinction 66 million years ago. Ferns thrived in the aftermath of the extinction, evidenced by the.....

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Steve Crawford@astrocrawford.bsky.social · last wk.

I am at the Patterson Park Simmer concert with Charm city songs and the Down Range army band. Someone just said ‘the point of the army is to preserve great music.’ And I’m like, I want to live in that future where the army is just composed of great musicians and that is their only purpose.

Steve Crawford@astrocrawford.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Good thread on recent Miri observations and this is a really interesting approach to handling data processing decisions - looking forward to reading more

Hannah Wakeford@stellarplanet.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When analyzing our data there are lots of choices we can make along the way, but there is no 1 way to do things. We decided to test these decisions by making a tree-structure where each branch represented rule-based choices made at that step in the analysis. Giving us 432 potential branches! 🔭🧪 🧵4/n

Diagram of the key steps considered in the MIRI/LRS Rule-based tree structure model for this dataset going from the uncal data to the final speci,j,k,.... At the nodes of the tree, branches are expanded for different reduction and analysis choices. Triple dots are used to indicate the continuation of the tree structure. The tree can be described as homogeneous or symmetric in that it can be thought of as a complete set of decisions with no dangling branches.
Julie Sofie K. Larsen@juli827g.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My first peer-reviewed paper is out in Scientific Reports! We studied how narwhals in NW Greenland respond to sea ice conditions, with implications for their future as Arctic ice declines🧊 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Arctic #Narwhal #MarineBiology #WildlifeConservation

Sea ice dynamics structure narwhal presence and seasonal movements in a Northwest Greenland fjord system - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Sea ice dynamics structure narwhal presence and seasonal movements in a Northwest Greenland fjord system

nature.com

Dr. Craig DeForest ☀️@craig.deforest.org · 3mo ago

Holy cow! Feast your eyes a while, on this gorgeous solar spectrum by the Sol'Ex instrument (assembled by Váradi Nagy Pál). It extends to UV and IR as well as the visible band. Marvel at the F lines, the fine structure, the IR doublets and repeating lines, and the molecular bands. Wonderful! ☀️🧪⚛️🔭

A very broadband solar spectrum reveals the colors of UV, visible light, and infrared light that are missing from the solar spectrum. The spectrum was collected by the "Sol'Ex" instrument, and assembled by Váradi Nagy Pál.
Melina Thévenot🏳️‍⚧️@melina-iras07572.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I looked at the machine-readable table 1 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... I co-discovered 101 of these 3000 brown dwarf candidates. I also co-discovered 2 candidate wide binaries (image). 🟣🟣🔄 (violet because that is probably their real color)

Two images with two red dots marked. The left image labels the dots as L8.5 and T2. The right image labels them as L9 and L5. Questionmarks were added because these are estimates based on their photometry.
Melina Thévenot🏳️‍⚧️@melina-iras07572.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Three Thousand Motion-Confirmed L and T Dwarf Candidates from the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project arxiv.org/abs/2604.01323 I am co-author and table 1 has my name in it. Once it is published I can look at it again and see how many include AA (my discoverer code).

Steve Crawford@astrocrawford.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Credit and provenance are often removed when using a general LLM. This is a problem as much of the scientific culture is in providing credit and provenance. So if you are not careful, the new idea developed with a general LLM can be someone else’s that was hidden in the training data.

Steve Crawford@astrocrawford.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Science takes all types of contributions and this is a great example of recognizing volunteer and community contributions when the rise to the level of co-authorship. #nasa #citizenscience #openscience science.nasa.gov/get-involved...

650 NASA Volunteers Have Co-Authored Scientific Papers - NASA Science

After a recent count, NASA Citizen Science is proud to report that more than 650 people who have volunteered to participate in NASA citizen science projects

science.nasa.gov