My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
The last panel of my comic book on fluid mechanics. This is where we start to see that with some mathematical analysis it will be possible to quantify the degree of realism (or lack thereof) in the depiction of fluid motion in (neo)classical paintings.
This is the ink of the second panel of page 8 of my fluid mechanics manga. I’ve decided to show the fluid physics material the way I present it in my own teaching videos. The idea is that a character is writing on a tablet, and the equations appear on the screen. This is the way it actually happened in my online lectures.
Here is the inked first panel on page 8 of my fluids manga. This is the point of the story where it becomes clear that some quantitative analysis of the depicted fluids phenomenon (the water jet pouring from the pitcher) is possible.
I’ve had a chance to add a couple of exposure hours of M81 and it’s neighbour M82, the Cigar Galaxy (on the right in the wide-field image.) The pair was one of my first targets when I picked up astrophotography last year.
M81 is 96,000 light-years in diameter, and the supermassive black hole in its centre has 15 times more mass than the black hole of our home Milky Way galaxy. Bode’s galaxy interacts with the nearby Cigar Galaxy, causing it to form new stars 10 times faster than the star-birth rate in the Milky Way galaxy.
The light in this photo is truly ancient – these photons travelled for 12 million years before reaching my camera. This is 5 hours of exposure collected at f/5.9 over two nights, almost exactly a year apart, from my yard in Victoria, BC.
One of the most recognizable nebulae, the dark head of a horse has its own catalogue number: B33. It’s a dense cloud of dust and cold hydrogen gas that blocks the light of the background stars and the red glow of ionized hydrogen. The large emission nebula in the background is IC 434 – an enormously active star-forming region. The bright young stars in it’s centre compress the gas with their stellar wind, creating new stars. The mass of the gas displaced by the ionization front of IC434 is about 10,000 Solar masses! I find it difficult to grasp the enormity of the number. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course, because there is nothing even remotely comparable to this truly astronomical mass that we encounter in daily life. For reference, one Solar mass is approximately 2*10^30 ( 2 nonillion) kg!
The bright dots at the base of the Horsehead are the stars that have just been formed, and the bluish smudge to the bottom left is a small reflection nebula NGC 2023. The bright explosion-like emission nebula farther to the left is the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), which has streaks of black dust blocking the background radiation.
This light travelled for 1,350 years before reaching my camera in Victoria, BC in January 2025. This is a 3.5-hr one-shot exposure at f/5.9 with a one-shot-colour (OSC) camera and a dual narrowband filter.
This is the ink of the last panel on page 7 of the comic book I’ve been putting together. Here, we start dissecting what is and is not realistic in the “La Source” painting from the fluid mechanics standpoint.
This is the ink of the third panel of page 7 of my manga book on fluids. While researching the story, I found some interesting info on how detectives actually measure objects in photos, where no obvious reference length is shown. The size of a human iris, apparently, is a fairly constant reference. Here, one of the main characters, Ariadne, explains this.
I wanted to photograph the Orion Nebula ever since becoming interested in astrophotography almost 30 years ago (in the pre-digital era!), and this is my first image, taken from my yard in Victoria, BC in January of 2025.
One can easily find this beautiful nebula even with a naked eye just below the Orion’s Belt. M42 is 25 light-years across, and it is one of the closest star nurseries to our Solar system. Massive young stars whip up strong stellar winds that compress the surrounding gas, creating turbulence and shock waves, which in turn create more stars.
The Orion Nebula is exceptionally colourful. The red hues are due to the radiation of the ionized hydrogen, and the blue and violet colours are the reflected radiation of the gigantic O-type stars at the core. There is even a greenish hue, which is very rare in deep space, due to a low-probability electron transition in the ionized oxygen. It’s called the “forbidden transition,” because it is notoriously difficult to reproduce in a lab, which lacks the high vacuum of space.
This light travelled for 1,300 years before reaching my camera. This is a 3.5-hr exposure at f/5.9, using a full-frame one-shot colour (OSC) camera and a dual narrowband filter.
This is the ink of the first two panels of page 7 of my fluids comic book. I needed to establish a system for measuring the reference lengths in the painting, so I had to do some research about how this could be done. The model of “La Source” is actually a known person, so her anatomy is an obvious reference. Nothing is known about her height or other measurements, though, as Ariadne and Athena discuss in these panels.
Here are the inks of the rest of the 6th page of my fluids comic book. This is how I decided to show the scientific content. I used my own presentation style from the COVID times, when I taught fluid mechanics online by writing on the screen, overlaying formulae and schematics with images.