Behind the Scenes: Dark Matter Collage

Hi all! Last week I made a collage for the LMAC contest, and I'd love to share my thoughts and the work progress behind it.

First here are the collages I made:

Here's some of my working progress for the collage of Zwicky. I'm only including my favorite techniques. Hope it can inspire you in some way!

Adding a ripple picture on top of the star picture, set the blending mode to multiple(soft light works too)to add ripple effects.

Copy this part of the mountain and put on top of the Observatory.

Using difference as a blend mode for the title. (The Difference blending mode takes the color with the highest brightness and subtracts from the layer with the darker color. i.e. Base Color minus Blend Color if the base color is brighter.) It's a good blend mode to use on top of the image. It does a good job to highlight the texts.

Draw a streamline shape as a mask for the galaxy picture.

cutting the galaxy picture in half, and liquify the bottom half as a reflection, set the blend mode to linear dodge(or lighten).

Here's a little info from what I learned doing a bit of background research:

Fritz Zwicky was looking at galaxy clusters in 1933 and saw a strange gravity anomaly. He described it as Dark Matter (in German) and that's where the name came from. He basically saw way more rotation than was predicted, so there must have been something invisible having an added effect to the galaxy. You can see him do this inside his own head (Picture 2)

Carl Sagan is a super famous science communicator, like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Both of them appear in these poster. Neil stated the quote at the top, and sagan is obviously the main feature in picture 1. If you look carefully, I added a badge of the golden record that went into space on the Voyager satellite, which is now over 23,000,000,000km away - outside of our solar system! The record has instructions for aliens to find us. It's designed so hopefully any smart aliens can figure it out using unbreakable laws of physics. So cool!

The galaxy pouring out of the bottle is meant to represent the gravitational lensing effect lemouth mentions in this post, which scientists can use to indirectly spot dark matter, which has some effect on gravity.

The equations, well, I don't understand them. But I know the Schwarzschild radius is in there, which is the radius of a black hole event horizon. So, if earth became a black hole, it would be crushed down to about 9mm! The sun's radius would only be 3km! There are some other formulas showing the angle of deflection in gravitational lensing. And, something about density or amount of dark matter in the Universe (about 25%). Don't know.

Anyway, all the nerdy stuff to the side...

Very glad I was able to join my first ever contest on Hive and took this chance to study science. It was a very rewarding opportunity for me! :)