Video: Panel on artists, exoplanets, and getting it right

Here’s a SETI Institute video of a panel discussion  on the topic of accurately depicting exoplanets:  Artists Imaging Exoworlds-Getting It Right (SETI Con 2)

 

From the caption:

Panelists:

  • Lynette Cook – most widely known as an out-of-this-world space artist, Cook has enthralled others with the wonders of the cosmos via her depictions of planets discovered outside our solar system. Published worldwide in books, periodicals, and documentaries, these renderings have been featured on ABC7 News and in USA Today.
  • Danielle Futselaar – owner of ArtSource Graphic Design Studio in the Netherlands. Artist/Illustrator and Graphic Designer. Her clients include UNICEF, TNT and AS Watson. Danielle is also the SETI Institute’s TeamSETI Volunteer Captain of Creative Design where she has illustrated and created complete graphic design packages for fundraising campaigns and SETIcon II. She also created the official artist impression of Asteroid Minerva and its Two Moons discovered by SETI Institute’s Franck Marchis.
  • Eric Hanson- A visual effects designer specializing in the creation of digital environments and effects for feature films, Eric Hanson has worked with noted visual effects houses such as Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, Dream Quest Images, and Walt Disney Feature Animation. His credits include The Fifth Element (1997), Bicentennial Man (1999), Cast Away (2000), Hollow Man (2000), Mission to Mars (2000), Spider-Man (2002) and Atlantis as well as many special-venue films.
  • Mark Showalter – Showalter is rabid about rings. While everyone knows about Saturn’s spectacular ring system, it’s often forgotten that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are also encircled by fainter and narrower rings. Each of these systems interacts closely with a family of small, inner moons. Showalter works on some of NASA’s highest-profile missions to the outer planets, including Cassini, now orbiting Saturn, and New Horizons, which flew past Jupiter en route to its 2015 encounter with Pluto. He has even searched for the rings of Mars, although so far with no success. Known for his persistence in planetary image analysis, Mark’s work on the earlier Voyager mission led to his discovery of Jupiter’s faint, outer “gossamer” rings and Saturn’s tiny ring-moon, Pan.

Moderator:

  • Franck Marchis – Dr. Franck Marchis is a Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and also an associate astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris. Our solar system is characterized by considerable diversity of its constituent bodies. Franck Marchis’ first involvement in the study of this diversity started in 1996 while working at the UNAM Astronomy Department in Mexico City. He made the first ground-based observations of the volcanoes on the jovian moon Io, using the first Adaptive Optics (AO) systems available on the European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6 m telescope in Chile. After a brief stay in London and four years in Chile at ESO, he completed in 2000 his PhD in France. Since then, he has been studying asteroids with large telescopes and he discovered in 2005 the first triple using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. His work consists in using and developing adaptive optics on current and future 30m telescopes dedicated to the study of the solar system and extra solar planets.