Chris Howard's Blog, page 65
May 15, 2018
This one’s called “Monitoring the Situation around...
This one’s called “Monitoring the Situation around K0921186.01”. The idea is that most people have forgotten the history of the original Kepler mission–a space observatory orbiting the Sun in the wake of the Earth, looking into deep space for exoplanets, or if you want to be strict about it, it was looking for KOIs (KOI = Kepler Object of Interest). Long after Kepler launched from Cape Canaveral, we continue to use the “K” prefix to identify objects, and we no longer look out from our orbit around our little star, but send out our information gathering machines to distant systems and vast star nurseries on the far side of our galaxy. Painted in ArtRage5 and PSCC on a UGEE 2150 graphics monitor, about four hours. http://SaltwaterWitch.com
May 13, 2018
Well, look what arrived in the mail yesterday! Yes, that’s...
Well, look what arrived in the mail yesterday! Yes, that’s a William Optics ZenithStar 61, a very portable apochromatic refractor from my favorite telescope maker. This cool little scope is like a baby version of my GT81, with a synthetic fluorite objective lens (which has some of the best lens properties, including ultra-low dispersion of light, etc.) I can’t wait for clear skies! #WilliamOptics
May 12, 2018
May 10, 2018
zerostatereflex:
Detailed View of a Solar Eclipse Corona
“Only...
Detailed View of a Solar Eclipse Corona
“Only in the fleeting darkness of a total solar eclipse is the light of the solar corona easily visible.”
May 8, 2018
Last night I tested out an inexpensive super-wide-angle 6mm...
Last night I tested out an inexpensive super-wide-angle 6mm C-mount lens hooked up to my QHYIII178 color CMOS camera (without the IR cut filter, which is why the trees are a bit odd looking). It was pretty cloudy to start and the whole view was fogged in by 3am, but I still managed to get the Milky Way as it was sweeping up and across the sky. This camera + lens would make a nice all-sky type setup, but I’m thinking about using this to capture the full night sky when we have meteor showers–the Lyrids, Perseids, Geminids. This shot is from one of the third-floor windows, facing east. (Our attic is finished). I can stick the camera with a long USB3 cable on the end of an 8-foot length of PVC pipe–out the same window–to get it above the roof of the house and get the whole sky in view. Then I can use SharpCap (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk) to capture several thousand 10-second frames over the course of the night, and bring them together into a video.
May 3, 2018
I know you said you're just doing watchmen right now, but is there any chance you'll be painting Vetinari? Absolutely love your art btw, especially Angua!
Thanks so much! I just had some commissions come in, but when I have time the plan is to round out the Ankh-Morpork team with Carrot and Vetinari, and then move on to Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg.
May 2, 2018
talesfromweirdland:
Evocative—and ambitiously cinematic—ATARI...
Evocative—and ambitiously cinematic—ATARI 2600 box art, in that typical Atari house style: a dreamy montage using sketchy pencil lines, acrylic, gouache, and maybe oils.
My favorite has always been that third one, for BASIC PROGRAMMING (1979): the programmer as a God.
April 30, 2018
I’m continuing the painting series of my favorite...
I’m continuing the painting series of my favorite Discworld characters. I started drawing Cheery on Saturday, which would have been Terry Pratchett’s 70th birthday. So, with a little sadness, I picked Corporal Cheery Littlebottom, a disgraced Alchemist who quickly becomes the forensics expert in the City Watch, and goes on to spark a gender revolution. We first meet Lance Constable Littlebottom in the book Feet of Clay. She’s a new recruit in the Watch. She’s originally from Überwald, and was in the Ankh-morpork Alchemist’s Guild for a while, but was a bit careless with the volatile compounds and kicked out. She’s like a one-woman CSI department, so their loss is Ankh-morpork’s gain. Even though she’s not a main character in any of the books, Cheery is definitely one of my favorites. I’m going to sum up with a passage from Feet of Clay between Captain Carrot (who is a bit on the conservative side) and Sergeant Angua:
“Do you think there’s something a bit…odd about Littlebottom?”
“Seems like a perfectly ordinary female to me,” said Angua.
“Female? He told you he was female?”
“She,” Angua corrected. “This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We’ve got extra pronouns here.”
More on gender equality in Pratchett: “Creating a Space of One’s Own: Dialogues of Gender in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” by Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem (https://goo.gl/uuEFzS).
More of my Discworld favorites: http://SaltwaterWitch.com
