Harvard Astronomer Pays Tribute to Van Gogh with Hubble Mosaic

One night, Harvard astronomer Alex Parker was camped out at the telescope for a spot of star-gazing, and found himself facing a long, dry period of waiting for the clouds to clear.

To pass the time, he started playing around with various images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and ended up assembling them into a colorful mosaic.

The resulting image? A recreation of Vincent van Gogh's most famous painting, "Starry Night".

Alex Parker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Institute for Theory and Computation, has created several astronomical videos on his own time and posted them on the Internet. 

His latest video depicts the 2,299 planet candidates Kepler has found since it began searching for planets around stars in 2009. 

According to sources "Parker used photo-mosaicing software to assemble the digital collage."

He had been thinking about using Hubble images to make a mosaic for awhile, since the telescope's 22nd anniversary was approaching; he just needed the right circumstances to find the time -- a cloudy night.

"Observing can be all over the map," Parker reported about his artistic endeavour. "You will be shut out by clouds on some nights, have to evacuate the mountain because of high winds and ice on other nights, and other times there isn't a moment to pause because you're taking data at such a high rate all night."