Today as I scanned through the news I was struck by a story about the Great Red Spot that lurks over the planet Jupiter and how it is shrinking. The spot is actually a big storm with 400 mile an hour winds, that would probably keep all the gases that make up the planet in one heck of swirl. Add the the fact that the planet spins so fast that it's day is only 10 hours long, but it takes 12 years to move around the sun and it boggles the mind that this could be so. I was amused by one of the scientists who commented that at his first viewing in 1996, the Spot looked like a breakfast sausage, but now it appears to have been on a diet and is more eyeshaped. I appreciate some humor with my science. Every time they send a probe to the planet it gets sucked in the the winds and blasts apart. They keep sending them, like little boys who like to see stuff smashed. In their defense, the pictures from a distance are beautiful and astonishing. It looks like a big round easter egg that keeps changing colors. Well, this got my imagination stirred up, and as I thought about what kind of life made up of gases could exist there on that giant of a planet, I grabbed my camera to play. There was a messy coffee spill on the kitchen counter this morning, and so I used that as the basis for my visual speculation. As I uploaded it, the original image seemed to morph into something of a fluid pattern. Nice, but not what I was searching for. Then I started playing with the colors, highlights, saturations, and all the fancy settings that are so easily manipulated by an amateur on the edit software in iPhoto. It still wasn't matching my wildest dreams of a life on Jupiter. Next, I downloaded the picture and tried all the same manipulations in the mac arsenal of edit tools. This photo-manipulation is a great source of joy for me... it's like the scribble pictures I used to make with paper and crayons. When I finally reached a point where I could see a gaseous image of an eyed thing, a fish, a mountain, and a distant moon I called it a "take" and well... there it is! Visions from Jupiter. My work is done.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Imagining Jupiter
Today as I scanned through the news I was struck by a story about the Great Red Spot that lurks over the planet Jupiter and how it is shrinking. The spot is actually a big storm with 400 mile an hour winds, that would probably keep all the gases that make up the planet in one heck of swirl. Add the the fact that the planet spins so fast that it's day is only 10 hours long, but it takes 12 years to move around the sun and it boggles the mind that this could be so. I was amused by one of the scientists who commented that at his first viewing in 1996, the Spot looked like a breakfast sausage, but now it appears to have been on a diet and is more eyeshaped. I appreciate some humor with my science. Every time they send a probe to the planet it gets sucked in the the winds and blasts apart. They keep sending them, like little boys who like to see stuff smashed. In their defense, the pictures from a distance are beautiful and astonishing. It looks like a big round easter egg that keeps changing colors. Well, this got my imagination stirred up, and as I thought about what kind of life made up of gases could exist there on that giant of a planet, I grabbed my camera to play. There was a messy coffee spill on the kitchen counter this morning, and so I used that as the basis for my visual speculation. As I uploaded it, the original image seemed to morph into something of a fluid pattern. Nice, but not what I was searching for. Then I started playing with the colors, highlights, saturations, and all the fancy settings that are so easily manipulated by an amateur on the edit software in iPhoto. It still wasn't matching my wildest dreams of a life on Jupiter. Next, I downloaded the picture and tried all the same manipulations in the mac arsenal of edit tools. This photo-manipulation is a great source of joy for me... it's like the scribble pictures I used to make with paper and crayons. When I finally reached a point where I could see a gaseous image of an eyed thing, a fish, a mountain, and a distant moon I called it a "take" and well... there it is! Visions from Jupiter. My work is done.
