I used to have a personal Web site, a good chunk of which was dedicated to
amateur astronomy.  However, it was hosted by my employer, and when I quit due
to health reasons, I lost access.

(Yes, my director informed me that my passwords had /already/ been deleted
before I left the HR office.  A prudent move, as tensions between my employer
and me had been rising, and I could have done severe damage to the institution
had I been that sort of person.  Earlier, a disgruntled employee had deleted a
bunch of data before quitting, forcing us to take a few valuable minutes out of
our day to restore them from backup.  Me?  Well, I knew where they kept the
backups.)

Although my personal site is not currently hosted anywhere, I still have it
archived at home.  It has icons for observation logs.  However, shortly before I
lost access to the on-line site, the IAU adopted a new class of object, the
dwarf planet.  Thus, I needed a new icon.  In the time since, I had not come up
with an idea, but New Horizons has now come to the rescue.  I would use an image
of Pluto to represent this class of object.

The leftmost icon is simply an image map of a well-known New Horizons composite.
 I thought it looked too indistinct at such a small size, so I created a
stylized model of Pluto.  At the center is a blow-up of the stylized icon, and
at the right is the stylized icon actual size.  Despite its simplicity, the
likeness is remarkable.

The colors used for the model were sampled from the New Horizons composite and
then boosted in brightness.

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'dwarfp-pbi.png' (10 KB)

Preview of image 'dwarfp-pbi.png'