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Some years ago my wife was involved with a massive space survey during an internship at the American Museum of Natural History. They were working in tandem with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a comprehensive effort to map the universe using ultra-sensitive light sensors. They used a vast array of giant metal plates with strategically placed holes in them to place over the imaging lenses to filter out the noise of lesser celestial bodies. We actually got our hands on one of these plates, and it sits above our couch in our living room, so I think about it often.
The P5 sketch (link here) manipulates pixel data from one of the images created from this epic sky survey. I say created, because they are essentially renderings extrapolated from this wavelength data. I mean, an image is just an interpretation of wavelengths of light, so it’s not different in that regard. The difference is that this image was intellectually built by crunching wavelength data. They were trying to create a 3-dimensional model of the universe using red-shift and blue-shift — a concept accredited to Mr. Hubble (of the famous telescope, and the biggest metric to English measurement conversion snafu in history that oddly enough led to the invention of the anti-aliasing filter). You can find the process at this link.
The idea is similar to the Doppler effect, where an object traveling into its own sound energy in your direction sounds higher in pitch, while an object moving away sounds lower. The same applies with light. Celestial bodies moving away from us appear red, and subsequently those moving towards us appear blue. This is the foundation of our belief in the expanding universe.
What I’ve done with this sketch is re-image the red and blue shift data back out of their composite rendering, thus isolating the core foundation that this artificial image is built from. What I like about this sketch is that it’s actually useful for interpreting celestial images, and we can very easily see which celestial bodies are coming and which are going.
At its core, this sketch is changing the fill color to random pixel values from the source image and drawing them as tiny circles. I also added a few lines that make sure it doesn’t repeat the same pixel twice, so it can actually accomplish drawing the image rather than the theoretical idea of completing something with random numbers that might take until the end of time from a certain point of view.
P.S. I wanted to give a shout out to Edgar Allan Poe for being the first person to write about the concept of the expanding universe. In “Eureka: a Prose Poem,” he basically conjectures that if the universe wasn’t expanding, we’d be burnt to a crisp by now with all of that violent solar energy being blasted at us from every direction of the universe.