Danielle Futselaar - AstroArtist of the Month

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Jun 02

2015

by Andrew Fazekas

Published: Tuesday, June 02 2015 00:30

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5 years ago i was watching a TV-show while I was trying to ignore that I was on my rowing machine for a daily dose of boring exercise. I had no idea then how watching that TV-show would effect my life. I had zapped to a show about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by Seth Shostak, the Senior Astronomer of the SETI Institute. Inspired by his humorous and impressive presentation I’d emailed the SETI Institute to send him my kudos. As a true fan of the movie “Contact” (I’ve seen that movie at least a dozen times) it was the least I could do, and I could not have been more surprised than when I received a reply from him… in Dutch, my native language. He used to live and work in the Netherlands for 13 years.

This kickstarted a much more serious interest in the search for ETI and the SETI Institute and I grew a wider interest for the universe at large.

A year later, in 2011 the Alan Telescope Array (ATA) used by the SETI Institute for their search, was put into hibernation because of financial issues. It was then that I offered my help as illustrator/designer, and with the proverbial ‘one thing led to another’ I ended up graphically designing and illustrating their entire ‘SETIconII’ Convention in 2012. After that I’ve worked on various other projects for a.o. the SETI Institute, NASA Ames, Berkeley University and ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy).

When I show people my space-art, one of the questions I mostly get is how much of the illustration is based on facts and how much of it is merely fantasy. And while I also have created pure fantasy artworks, the artist impressions of astronomy discoveries always have been based on as many facts and information as the scientists could provide. Under embargo I would receive the information i needed to create an image to depict the discovery. I’m thankful that they explained it in a way that *I* (a non-scientist or astronomer) could understand it, and with the necessary email-traffic back and forth, Skype-calls and tweaks we’d come to a result.

Over the next few weeks i will blog about some of these assignments, and explain a bit about the background of the project.

SETIcon II posters:
One of the first projects i worked on for the SETI Institute has been SETIcon II. A two-day during convention. These 4 posters depict the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), search for microbial life, space exploration and terraforming. We included a quote and signature of respected SETI Institute scientists on each poster (Jill Tarter, David Morrison, Frank Drake and Seth Shostak).

Minerva and Sylvia

Both these pictures show asteroids, which i have illustrated for Franck Marchis, Senior Planetary Astronomer at the SETI Institute, who studied the asteroids with the help of the Keck Telescope.

Illustration Kepler 186 and Kepler 186 planet compositions. Illustrated for Elisa Quintana Research, Scientist with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
This picture of the Kepler 186f discovery shows the planet if it were indeed a habitable planet, being it the first “Earth’s cousin” found in the habitable zone of its star. Only about 10 percent larger than Earth.
The three compositions depict the planet in the three possible compositions: ice, iron and rock.