An Astronomical Disappointment
Jul. 31st, 2007 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beamjockeyRecently, Patrick Nielsen Hayden linked to an essay about the artwork on the new U.S. passports.
I learned that alongside images of flags, Liberty Bells, Mt. Rushmore Presidents, and so forth, the passport has a bit of astronomical art.
I love the idea of illustrating America's exploration of space on our coins, stamps, and passports[1], so at first this seemed exciting. Soon, it seemed disappointing.
It's Pioneer 10, or maybe 11, mighty close to the Moon, with the Earth in the background[2]. I will leave it as an exercise for the student to prove that the point of view is about 450,000 kilometers from the Earth.
The Moon shows realistic detail, but, curiously, the Earth does not. There is not a cloud to be seen. Instead we see the outline of North America. It looks like a scene from a 1950s science fiction movie, before artists understood that the Earth really looks fairly fluffy and white when seen from space.
Also, the terminator appears to run from Kiribati in the Pacific to the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic. The subsolar point is near the northern Yukon. I haven't done the math, but this seems wrong for a planet inclined 23.5 degrees to its orbital plane.
Now if you go a-googling for a picture of Pioneer 10, you will soon find a 1981 NASA publication called A Meeting with the Universe, which contains this interesting painting:
It appears to have exactly the same composition of Earth, Moon, and Pioneer; even the RTGs and magnetometer boom are posed at the same angle.
But it shows the Earth with dark ocean and white clouds, quite realistically, and if there is a landmass visible, I can't make out what it is. On the Moon, the dark feature at the bottom edge of the picture might possibly be Mare Moscoviense.
[Edited later to add: Heck, no-- central peak, irregular dark floor-- it's gotta be the mighty crater Tsiolkovsky. The artist knew his way around Farside, and I didn't.]
Obviously, the new passport image is a "swipe" of the old NASA painting. If the old painting was created for NASA, it is copyright-free (by NASA policy), and there are no legal restrictions on creating a derivative work based on it.
Conceivably, the State Department might even have asked the same artist to recreate it for the passports. Though I like to think that someone with the talent to do the NASA painting would object to portraying a cloudless Earth with an alarmingly canted terminator.
Who is the artist who painted the NASA illustration? (Ron Miller? Don Davis? David Hardy?)
Who is the artist who created the passport illustration?
Can you find a better-quality rendering of the passport artwork online? Or slap a new passport onto a scanner?
(By the way, here's an essay on the aesthetics of the new passport illustrations.)
[1] And I encourage other nations to do the same with their own space achievements.
[2] I doubt either Pioneer came quite this close to the Moon, but I have to allow the artists some license...
I learned that alongside images of flags, Liberty Bells, Mt. Rushmore Presidents, and so forth, the passport has a bit of astronomical art.
I love the idea of illustrating America's exploration of space on our coins, stamps, and passports[1], so at first this seemed exciting. Soon, it seemed disappointing.
It's Pioneer 10, or maybe 11, mighty close to the Moon, with the Earth in the background[2]. I will leave it as an exercise for the student to prove that the point of view is about 450,000 kilometers from the Earth.
The Moon shows realistic detail, but, curiously, the Earth does not. There is not a cloud to be seen. Instead we see the outline of North America. It looks like a scene from a 1950s science fiction movie, before artists understood that the Earth really looks fairly fluffy and white when seen from space.
Also, the terminator appears to run from Kiribati in the Pacific to the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic. The subsolar point is near the northern Yukon. I haven't done the math, but this seems wrong for a planet inclined 23.5 degrees to its orbital plane.
Now if you go a-googling for a picture of Pioneer 10, you will soon find a 1981 NASA publication called A Meeting with the Universe, which contains this interesting painting:
It appears to have exactly the same composition of Earth, Moon, and Pioneer; even the RTGs and magnetometer boom are posed at the same angle.
But it shows the Earth with dark ocean and white clouds, quite realistically, and if there is a landmass visible, I can't make out what it is. On the Moon, the dark feature at the bottom edge of the picture might possibly be Mare Moscoviense.
[Edited later to add: Heck, no-- central peak, irregular dark floor-- it's gotta be the mighty crater Tsiolkovsky. The artist knew his way around Farside, and I didn't.]
Obviously, the new passport image is a "swipe" of the old NASA painting. If the old painting was created for NASA, it is copyright-free (by NASA policy), and there are no legal restrictions on creating a derivative work based on it.
Conceivably, the State Department might even have asked the same artist to recreate it for the passports. Though I like to think that someone with the talent to do the NASA painting would object to portraying a cloudless Earth with an alarmingly canted terminator.
Who is the artist who painted the NASA illustration? (Ron Miller? Don Davis? David Hardy?)
Who is the artist who created the passport illustration?
Can you find a better-quality rendering of the passport artwork online? Or slap a new passport onto a scanner?
(By the way, here's an essay on the aesthetics of the new passport illustrations.)
[1] And I encourage other nations to do the same with their own space achievements.
[2] I doubt either Pioneer came quite this close to the Moon, but I have to allow the artists some license...
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 01:51 am (UTC)TweeeeT! Ten yard penalty, Transnational Hubris. 2nd Down!
That's a serious amount of pejorative sentiment there. What's wrong with a arm of a government promoting itself and the ideals for which it stands? Yeah the US F**ksup a lot but Miss
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 02:58 am (UTC)Hey cool! We both agree on this, "I don't approve." I guess this means voting in every election and being informed on the issues plus letting your elected officials know what your concerns are. Standing by passively isn't good for anyone.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 03:37 am (UTC)Citizens aren't part of the government unless they actually do some governing. Voting and paying taxes doesn't count. Passing and enforcing laws does.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 02:24 am (UTC)Just trying to shed a little light on why the picture was changed. ⇒ Changed priorities.
Us scientists sometimes stub our toes (or worse) when we don't recognize that the paradigm of science and truth and accuracy isn't the driving force in a given human interaction / situation that we're dealing with. Sometimes some of us get our face rubbed in it so often and hard, we can sound a tad bitter about it, n'est-ce pas?
Ten years ago, the same picture switch wouldn't have had nearly so much political baggage to carry. Also, if done 10 years ago it probably would have had more accurate illumination and terminator lines.
BTW, if I didn't want my country to get fixed, I wouldn't be complaining, and exercising my Constitutional right to free speech, now, would I? I'd simply be walking away to another nation, and letting this one go to Hades in a handbasket without me.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 03:08 am (UTC)Re: your last paragraph, Hear! Hear! :-) I hope the 2008 elections will let the past 16 years of very partisan bitterness recede to a much less contentious simmer. And yes I do believe in Santa Claus, I have a 3 year old grand-daughter helping that. :-)