This is the artwork for "Astronomy", my upcoming EP of instrumental tracks.
These songs are a departure from my singer/songwriter persona and lean towards jazz. One of the things I did during COVID was to spend more time practicing guitar and piano and these six tracks resulted from the new things I'm learning.
Astronomy is the branch of science which deals with celestial objects, space, and the physical universe as a whole. It's a big subject and well suited for a musical journey. With each song I've tried to express the wonder of the physical world, here on our beautiful, tiny planet and out there across the unimaginable reaches of interstellar space. Astronomy is about exploration and discovery and can also be applied to our personal lives as well. For me, this foray into unfamiliar musical territory has been exciting and rewarding. As these songs evolved they have led me to places I never thought I'd visit. As it turns out, a lifetime of listening to jazz, including favorites like Pat Metheny, Zappa and Steely Dan, had tuned my ears to this genre, so it's just been a matter of focused study to open the door and venture into this territory.
The recordings are coming along and I should be putting the tracks out soon, along with some posts about how the songs were developed. Here's the info on the image from NASA's website:
The galaxy captured in this image, called UGC 12158, certainly isn’t camera-shy: this spiral stunner is posing face-on to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, revealing its structure in fine detail.
UGC 12158 is an excellent example of a barred spiral galaxy in the Hubble sequence — a scheme used to categorise galaxies based on their shapes. Barred spirals, as the name suggest, feature spectacular swirling arms of stars that emanate from a bar-shaped centre. Such bar structures are common, being found in about two thirds of spiral galaxies, and are thought to act as funnels, guiding gas to their galactic centres where it accumulates to form newborn stars. These aren’t permanent structures: astronomers think that they slowly disperse over time, so that the galaxies eventually evolve into regular spirals.
The appearance of a galaxy changes little over millions of years, but this image also contains a short-lived and brilliant interloper — the bright blue star just to the lower left of the centre of the galaxy is very different from the several foreground stars seen in the image. It is in fact a supernova inside UGC 12158 and much further away than the Milky Way stars in the field — at a distance of about 400 million light-years! This stellar explosion, called SN 2004ef, was first spotted by two British amateur astronomers in September 2004 and the Hubble data shown here form part of the follow-up observations.
This picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Images through blue (F475W, coloured blue), yellow (F606W, coloured green) and red (F814W, coloured red) as well as a filter that isolates the light from glowing hydrogen (F658W, also coloured red) have been included. The exposure times were 1160 s, 700 s, 700 s and 1200 s respectively. The field of view is about 2.3 arcminutes across.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA