My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
This is the ink of the last panel on page 2. It’s the first time all four characters appear in the same frame. I thought it would be a good time to use a kind of “the knights of the round table” perspective to show them as a group.
These are the rest of the supporting characters in my short fluids-related crime story. I enjoyed developing them and making concept drawings early on. However, simplifying those for this inking stage, so that the characters would hopefully be recognizable and easy enough to draw multiple times from various angles was not trivial. In fact, I had to come back to these panels and tweak them quite a bit as I progressed further into the book.
Here is the ink of the first panel on the second page of my fluids comic book. The second page was easier to conceptualize than the first one, since it was a straightforward introduction of the supporting characters. Among them, I had a clearest vision of this one, Trevis, and as a consequence, he changed the least from the initial character design stage.
My current workflow for processing one-shot colour images of deep-space objects, particularly nebulae, heavily relies on the process of reconstruction a foraxx palette outlined in this video by Paulyman Astro (https://youtu.be/Gy42AeZ_XB4?si=lNb4B7a0jVKWi4I1).
The video is very detailed, and it has been exceptionally useful for me, but I found myself scrolling through it and pausing so much that I wanted to have a written summary of the steps that I could quickly refer to. Apologies in advance, if the following steps appear out-of-context – they are really short notes that would make sense to those who have used the Pixinsight software and worked with the foraxx palette.
Before this image processing is even started, I generate an integrated image using the following pre-processing sequence (see this guide by Adam Block for details: https://youtu.be/VKOTCuqD2Qs?si=EdbONwT8GO_DUAkR) :
First of all, all the individual exposures (light frames), which are typically 5-min long each, are calibrated with “flats”, “dark flats” and “darks” using the WeightedBatchPreprocessing script.
Then, the resulted de-bayered images are aligned using the StarAlignment process.
Finally, the aligned images are integrated using the ImageIntergation process with Winthorised Sigma Clipping background rejection method. This produces the “integration.xisf” image, which is the basis for the nebula processing workflow itself:
And this is it! Here are some examples of my application of this process applied to various emission nebulae.
This emission nebula is one of the youngest star-forming regions in our galaxy. Some components of it are only few million years old. In the cosmic time scale, this is basically star birth happening in front of our eyes. This nebula also contains the hottest star found within 1 kpc of our Sun, the BD+66 1673, which has the surface temperature of 45,000 K and the luminosity 100,000 times that of the Sun. It is primarily responsible for ionizing the gas of the nebula and for compressing it by the strong stellar wind, leading to creation of new stars.
This light travelled for 3,000 years before reaching my yard in Victoria, BC in June 2024.
NGC 7822 is a large target, filling the full-frame sensor of my camera attached to a 478 mm-long telescope. This is a 3.5 hr-long RGB exposure at f/5.9, processed using a Foraxx palette.
This is the ink of the last two panels on the first page of my fluids comic book. The first closeup of one of the main characters required quite a bit of thinking through in order to simplify the original character design. Professionals like Victoria Ying say that by the end of the inking process one becomes very good at drawing the main characters, because they appear so often. I am certainly looking forward to that, but in the meantime, I was quite glad to simply finish the first page.
Here is the ink of the third panel of my fluids comic book. When I was laying out this panel, I made a decision to use a 3D model for the backgrounds, and now that I am several pages into inking, I am certainly glad that I did so. Considering that the story takes place in the same room full of small details, maintaining consistency of the set without the ability to simply re-position the camera would have been impossible.
I’ve been working on a fictional short story, hopefully the first in a series, on the subject of my academic research and teaching – fluid mechanics. As a colleague of mine said about teaching fluids at the university level, “fluids is a dry subject”. In the hope of making it a bit more entertaining, I’decided to try a manga format. It’s a crime story set in the not-very-distant future with the working title “The Flowing Clue: La Source Unveiled”
Here are the inks of the first two panels. Stay tuned for the updates on this work in progress.
I captured this image of the Croc’s Eye Galaxy (M94, also called the Cat’s Eye Galaxy) yesterday in my yard in Victoria, BC, using a total of 3 hours of exposure. It’s an unusual galaxy – it has a an inner ring with a diameter of 5,400 light-years and an outer one with a diameter of 45,000 light-years. Pressure from the galactic core compresses the gas and dust clouds in the outer ring, where gravity pulls them together to form new stars. These stars pull in more gas and dust, resulting in a relatively empty region separating them from yet another layer of gas at the periphery of the galaxy.
M94 has a remarkably low amount of dark matter for a galaxy – the stars comprise almost all of its mass. Their light travelled for 16 million years before reaching my telescope.
Fiction:
I’ve been postponing reading Asimov’s books, and this one demonstrated that I was wrong. It is a classic for a reason. Amazing prose and very cool characters.
Non-fiction:
It’s interesting to listen to a personal opinion on the nature and meaning of life of a historian and philosopher written at the end of his long life, spent documenting experiences of other people. It is also curios that the manuscript of this book was actually lost and published only after Durant’s death. Also amazing how demonstrably misled even such educated and academically-minded person could be about topics that are only marginally beyond his field of study. I suppose, it’s an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
I liked the idea of interconnectedness of the psychological balance and physical wellness. One example that I particularly liked was on the undeniable effectiveness of placebo (as well as its opposite, the nocebo) in various medical trials. This book has about the maximum amount of woo-woo that I can tolerate without immediately becoming too skeptical to continue listening. What also helps is that the author has a traditional scientific background, which add certain structure to the presentation of the ideas.
I was a bit skeptical about this book because of a somewhat cheesy title, but I was pleasantly surprised. It is largely about the nature of self-sabotage and ways of avoiding it. One message that resonated particularly well was the necessity to normalize the new psychological state, e.g., feeling happy, in order to shift the baseline towards it. I will certainly consider Weist’s follow-up books as future reads.
I came across referenced to this book before, but this is the first time I listened to the entire thing. It was reviewed in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast that I sometimes listen to while walking the dog. It’s a very structured, for a popular science book, overview of study and teaching methodologies. The main takeaways for me were that Spacing and interleaving of practice constitute desirable difficulties. Also, tat generative self-quizzing is more effective than multiple-choice type or re-reading of the material.
I heard about this autobiography any time in the podcasts that I follow, most notably “The Tim Ferris Show”, but finally I decided to listen to it. It’s an excellent book indeed. Very entertaining, insightful and inspiring. It is also another example of the benefit of the audio format, where the author and the reader is the same person. It also helps that he is a good actor.
Some thoughts about the conventional concept of a career, and how outdate it is in the modern world. There is an attempt to hammer in this point with some statistics, but the rigor of the statistical analysis is a bit suspect, and I think the point is clear enough without all the surrounding fuss. The stories are entertaining, but there author is trying a bit too hard to deliver the point that diversity is paramount when considering the variety of jobs and occupations in the modern world.
Well, Brianna Weist has certainly been the author of the year for me. I re-listened to “The Mountain is You” and liked this book too. It is clearly a compilation of blog posts, which is actually quite inspiring.
My app shows that finished listening to this book to the end, but at the time of this writing, I have no recollection of what I learned from it. I should definitely be more diligent with taking notes, but it probably says something about the book too.
This is excellent. I found this summary of thoughts about the creative process very relatable, despite the author’s background in music production, which is quite foreign to me.
I remember that I enjoyed it, although struggle to recall what specifically I learned.
That was a very nice read (listen). I enjoyed the overview of the author’s personal journey to “amateur buddhism”. It inspired me to read a couple more books on Buddhism immediately afterwards.
The author was featured i “10% Happier” as Dan Harris’ mentor/teacher, so I decided to take a look (listen) at his work. It was quite nice. My favourite part is the anecdote about locking the keys in the car immediately after a mindfullness retreat and being Ok with it.
This is another reference from “10% Happier”. For what it worth, my app shows that I abandoned it at 52%.
A cool concept, but the author’s tangents about how amazing and non-conformist he is detracts from the experience quite a bit. If anything, it indirectly confirms the idea of the inherent value of formal education.
A biography of Napoleon. One of my favourite books this year.
