My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
This is the top of page 10 of my fluids manga. As I was writing the script, I learned a neat way of extracting temporal data from a single still representation of the fluid flow. This is the set-up for the explanation of how it works.
These are the inks of the last two panels on page 9 of the fluids comic book. Here, Ariadne points out the first definitive inconsistency in the “La Source” painting.
Here are the inks of the first three panels of page 9 of my fluids manga book. This is a calculation of the axis-switching wavelength of a water jet according to the modern model. In fact, as it’s explained here, a simplified model of the phenomenon already existed when “La Source” was painted, but the painting doesn’t agree with it.
Taking a break from shooting galaxies far-far away: this colourful globular cluster is located within our galaxy, although in isolation – 38,800 light-years from the centre of the Milky Way and far above the galactic plane. M3 contains more than 500,000 stars, at least 274 of which are variable, which is more than any other known cluster. The brightness of variable stars fluctuates with time, making them useful for estimating their distances.
This image is a 4-hr LRGB exposure, taken at the end of April, 2025 in my yard in Victoria, BC. It took this light 34,000 years to travel here.
his is one of my favourite galaxies. It is one of the largest and brightest in the observable sky from my latitude, and it’s full of fascinating details. The pink glowing spots are the nebulae consisting of ionized hydrogen, where the new stars are formed. Clusters of these new hot stars are visible as the bright blue dots in the spiral arms.
The Pinwheel is nearly twice as large as our Milky Way galaxy – about 170,000 light-years across, and it contains trillion stars. Their light travelled for 21 million years to reach my camera in Victoria, BC.
This image is an integration of 5.5 hours of exposure, collected over two nights April 2025.
This month, I was able to photograph nebulae in another galaxy! The bright red spots in the spiral arms of NGC 2403 are clouds of ionized hydrogen, where new stars are being born. The galaxy is also the place of the most recent observed death of a star – a supernova SN 2004dj was discovered in one of its arms by an amateur Japanese astronomer in 2004. A massive star exploded at the end of its life, shedding the outer layers of gas and sending them away from its collapsed core.
I think it’s incredible that we can observe these amazing deep-sky events from our backyards. This light travelled for 11 million years before reaching my camera in Victoria, BC. This photo required a processing approach that was new to me. It’s a 4 hours of total exposure, collected over two nights. The H-alpha light emission from the nebulae was captured through a separate narrowband filter and integrated into the LRGB (Luminance-Red-Green-Blue) image using the continuum subtraction technique.
Last week, I’ve collected about 5.25 hrs of total exposure of the famous Whirlpool galaxy. I photographed it almost exactly a year ago with a different camera, and it was the first galaxy image that I was quite pleased with. Well, the show itself didn’t change much in a year, although this is a galactic interaction in progress. The dwarf companion galaxy NGC 5195 has been flying past the Whirlpool for hundreds of millions of years, generating plumes of gas driven by the tidal forces between the two galaxies.
The M51 itself is about 400 million years old. We are seeing the stage of the intergalactic dance that actually happened quite a while ago because of how incredibly far these galaxies are. Their light travelled for 31 million years before reaching my yard in Victoria, BC.
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.