Hey everyone,

I was really suprised this week while browsing the SocialStem community when I saw the LMAC contest in the community !
As I am really interested in the Stem community of hive and that I try to read and understand every @lemouth's posts I was really interest in dark matter and I really wanted to unleash my creativity on this challenge.

But enough talking let me show you my work and then explain the way I made it !

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Mind blown by dark matter

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So here is my entry for the context, you may not recognize the image that we had to start from because I tweaked it a little and made it a bit darker (to stick with the theme in a way but mainly to give a more realistic aspect of outer space)

So in the following lines of the article I will explain every step of the process leading to the creation of this entry, from the start to the end.

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So first let's start with the begginning, the image from the original post:

^{[Credits: Jeremy Thomas (public domain)]}

My first goal was to make this image seem a bit more realistic, as I'm really used to watch the night sky I knew there was something unrealistic about this image, the galaxy is way to bright to appear this way to the humankind without any tool or tric such as long exposure, so I firstly manipulated the curve of the image relative to brightness (as I'm french the context menus are also in french because it is easier for me :) sorry if you miss informations because of that.)

^{Modification of the image using Paint.NET, a free software}

My next idea was to include a black hole even if there is no real link with dark matter the two fields of research seemed to fit perfectly together in my opinion, I almost immediately linked particle physics with cosmology and astrophysics when i started to put interest in it. But I know for sure with the latest article from lemouth that they are not specially linked. As I'm really interested and fascinated by black holes I had already created a model of a black hole in Blender earlier in my life and hopefully I was able to find my work. So here is some screenshots of how I made the black hole :

^{The sphere represent the blackhole itself, or I'd rather say the event horizon of the singularity and the photon ring of the black hole. The plane dividing the sphere in two part is the accretion disk, and the plane on the background is there to represent the cosmos behind, it's the image from the start}

^{This is the render of the Blender scene I'm pretty satisfied with it but I would have liked a bigger effect of space-time distortion}

The next part was about to had my sense of creativity to the project and make a proper collage, to fit with the theme I decided to express the complexity of the theory and how hard it could be to think about it. I decided to express this with the help of a greek statue cut in half to express how mind blowing it can be, (the fact That I choose a greek statue is purely a choice of mine, I really like ancient greek aesthetics) I found the picture that I wanted on pixabay and cut it out to implement it in my work:

I also included some kind of abstract art that I found on the LIL named confusion wich was a perfect match to express my feeling when trying to understand what really was dark matter.

And voilà

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I hope you liked how I presented my work, I tried to present it in a really formal way by depicting each step precisely as scientist do !

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Images I used for this project:

^{Source Pixabay : Sushuti}

Contributed to the #LIL by @justclickindiva.

^{[Credits: Jeremy Thomas (public domain)]}