My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
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.
This is the ink of the panel where the whole story is summarized. The rest is simply explaining the line of thought that leads Ariadne to this conclusion.
This emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation resembles its namesake character from the classic video game. It also resembles a heart if viewed from a different angle. It is rather dim and diffuse while observed visually, but is quite neat and full of details when photographed using multiple guided exposures. A small open star cluster (IC 1590) ionizes the gas of the Pacman, which is criss-crossed by lines of dark dust. It also contains several Bok globules, which are isolated dark nebulae that consist of dense clouds of dust and gas. These clouds are in the process of condensing and will form new stars in the future.
This future star nursery is located in the Perseus Arm of our Milky Way galaxy. I captured its light in early October of 2024, after it travelled for 9,500 years to my yard in Victoria, BC. This image is an integration of forty 5-minute RGB exposures, taken through a 478 mm-long, f/5.9 telescope.
Here is the second half of page 5 of my fluids manga. Looking back at these inks, which I made a few weeks ago, I think that the characters became a bit too simplified at this point. There are good reasons for it from the comic book readability standpoint, but I probably enjoy drawing slightly more detailed illustrations. When I come back to these panels for colouring, I might play with rendering a bit more than I originally planned.
Here are the inks of the first half of page 5 of my comic book. A key point that I learned from Victoria Ying is that the text takes priority in a comic book, and the images have to fit around it. I am sure that without this advice, I would have under-estimated how much space the speech bubbles take, even with a relatively small font size.
These are the inks of the last two panels on page 4 of my manga book. That’s the set-up of the story – the rest is basically an exploration of the painting and it’s subject. Stay tuned – it’s quite fascinating!