{"id":14476,"date":"2017-06-08T15:59:39","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T19:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=14476"},"modified":"2017-06-08T15:59:39","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T19:59:39","slug":"the-art-of-exoplanets-the-challenge-of-depicting-what-has-not-been-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=14476","title":{"rendered":"“The Art of Exoplanets” – The challenge of depicting what has not been seen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a NASA article about how artists create imagery of planets around other stars\u00a0realistically despite the fact no one has ever seen such an exoplanet up close:<\/p>\n

The Art of Exoplanets<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The moon hanging in the night sky sent Robert Hurt\u2019s mind into deep space — to a region some 40 light years away, in fact, where seven Earth-sized planets crowded close to a dim, red sun.<\/p>\n

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This artist’s concept shows what each of the TRAPPIST-1 planets may look like, based on available data about their sizes, masses and orbital distances. Credits: NASA\/JPL-Caltech Full image and caption<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hurt, a visualization scientist at Caltech\u2019s IPAC center<\/a>, was walking outside his home in Mar Vista, California, shortly after he learned of the discovery of these rocky worlds around a star called TRAPPIST-1 and got the assignment to visualize them. The planets had been revealed by NASA\u2019s Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based observatories.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just stopped dead in my tracks, and I just stared at it,\u201d Hurt said in an interview. \u201cI was imagining that could be, not our moon, but the next planet over \u2013 what it would be like to be in a system where you could look up and see continental features on the next planet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

So began a kind of inspirational avalanche. Hurt and his colleague, multimedia producer Tim Pyle, developed a series of arresting, photorealistic images of what the new system\u2019s tightly packed planets might look like — so tightly packed that they would loom large in each other\u2019s skies. Their visions of the TRAPPIST-1 system would appear in leading news outlets around the world.<\/p>\n