Tag: NASA

The Lagoon Nebula

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Gas and Dust of the Lagoon Nebula by Fred Vanderhaven.

The Pink Lagoon, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Striking details can be traced through this remarkable picture, processed to remove stars and hence better reveal the Lagoon’s range of filaments of glowing hydrogen gas, dark dust clouds, and the bright, turbulent hourglass region near the image center. This color composite view was recorded under dark skies near Sydney, Australia. At the Lagoon’s estimated distance, the picture spans about 50 light-years.

Maldoror illustrated

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Les Chants de Maldoror by Corominas (2007).

There seems to be no escaping from HP Lovecraft just now, the illustration above having been created for a PDF publication entitled CTHULHU, Cómics y relatos de ficción oscura, produced by these people. The Cthulhu-zine seems to be unavailable but you can see more of these splendid illustrations, based on Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), at Dorian Gray BD. The artist, Corominas, has an additional blog showcasing more commercial work.

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Les Chants de Maldoror by Jacques Houplain (1947).

Lautréamont’s delirious masterpiece isn’t exactly the easiest book to illustrate but the Corominas drawings certainly capture some of its ferocious energy. The Surrealists were big Maldoror enthusiasts, of course, and did much to establish Lautréamont’s current reputation. Salvador Dalí produced a series of engravings for a Skira edition in 1934 although his drawings look less like illustrations of the text than a rifling of the artist’s usual preoccupations. The picture above by Jacques Houplain is one of a series of twenty-seven engravings produced for a French edition in the 1940s. More recently, Jean Benoît created (among other things) a Maldororian dog and there’s even been an attempt at a comic-strip adaptation from Hernandez Palacios. On the whole I prefer the Corominas pictures but then I’m biased towards that style of drawing which owes something to all the comic artists and illustrators influenced by Franklin Booth.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• The art of Jean Benoît

The persistence of DNA

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The Persistence of Memory (1931).

Forensic scientist uses DNA to explore Dalí’s bizarre genius
Samples taken from nasal feeding tubes could also help to authenticate works

James Randerson in San Antonio
The Guardian, Saturday, February 24, 2007

IT IS LIKE something from a surrealist still life—a hat, glasses, moustache and toilet seat. This is the collection of belongings that forensic scientist Michael Rieders was offered when he put the word out that he was trying to track down Salvador Dalí’s DNA.

“I have been fascinated by Dalí and his artwork since I was around 11 years old,” he said. “I found it hard to believe that a person could come up with such exotic, bizarre art.”

By tracking down Dalí’s DNA he felt he could get closer to the surrealist artist. But more than that, he hoped that if he could characterise Dalí’s DNA fingerprint, he could use it to help authenticate the handful of paintings and artworks that are not signed but are claimed by some to have been painted by the Spanish master.

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