Telling Stellar Stories

What are digital stories and how do you tell them? At a recent exhibit at Brown University, that topic was examined in a few different ways. One of the stories shown was a large screen version of images and text selected out of the "From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) collection. FETTU is a Chandra-led project of astronomical image exhibits that began in the International Year of Astronomy in 2009 but has remained as a legacy project of public science. The location types of the FETTU exhibits have ranged from cafes to malls to metros.

Exhibiting FETTU with Brown University's large visualization wall in the Rockefeller library offered a special opportunity to display ultra-large astronomy data sets on a huge screen that lets the viewer not only see details in the images that are hard to see on small screens but also helps the viewer feel somewhat immersed in the image. The science images included Chandra’s composite with Hubble and Spitzer of the galactic center, a recent Solar Dynamics Observatory image of our Sun (shown here), an image of Mount Sharp, Mars from the Curiosity mission, and 5 other objects.

Other digital stories from the exhibit included narrated personal stories shown in still image and video formats, and interactive stories including map and timeline-based stories.

For more on the Brown exhibit, check out their web page: http://digibrownies.weebly.com/ and for more on the visualization wall at Brown, see http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/10/hardware-2/visualization-wall-the.... For more on FETTU, please visit: http://www.fromearthtotheuniverse.org/

-Kim Arcand, Chandra

Photo credits: Brown University/Lindsay Elgin