Who makes "artist renderings" of the cosmos?

It's hard to illustrate articles about exoplanet research. The pictures from deep-space telescopes just doesn't really look the way your readers want it to look. Instead of an image of a mysterious far-off planet that people can imagine themselves visiting, you get a little blip in the light of a distant star and reams of computer modeling data.

That's why space scientists love artistic renderings—man-made illustrations meant to give you an impression of what an exoplanet might look like. But where do those pictures come from? And how accurate are they? To answer those questions, Txchnologist has a really interesting profile of Dr. Robert Hurt and Tim Pyle, the artists behind most of the artistic renderings you see decorating astronomy news.

Hurt will try to boil the data down to its visual essence and work with Pyle to make sure the image accords with what science knows about it. It’s often possible to glean the planet’s colors based on the content of its atmosphere but much is left to the artists’ imagination and what they want to convey.

“If you want to sell the idea that the planet is the size of Jupiter, you might give it a Jupiter-like storm,” Hurt said, referring to the Great Red Spot.

NASA wanted to link the real binary star system to the fictional Tatooine of Star Wars and even invited a visual effects supervisor who had worked on the movie to the press conference. So at the last minute, the artists decided to switch the position of the suns so the yellow star was higher in the sky, as it is in the movie. The switch meant the lighting pattern on the planet was slightly off, which Hurt heard about from at least one stickler. (There was no scientific reason for the stars to be aligned one way or the other, just artistic preference, Hurt said.)

For the record: Txchnologist is a science news site that's funded by GE, but they aren't strictly an ad for GE. I've chosen to link to them because they have some neat stories that don't seem to be driven by marketing or heavily biased. But I wanted to let you know what's up with the site, in case you stumble across something there that is more promotion-ish.

• [bazzargh]

  Do they do solar as well as extrasolar planets? When can we look forward to Pyle’s and Hurt’s Uranus?

  Ahem.

• [Jonah Petri]

  I have to say that I never liked these types of renderings too much.  They hide the awesomely cool nature of scientific discovery – show the screen shot from the damn space telescope, pixelation be damned!  99% of the public doesn’t give a crap about science at all, airbrushed planetscapes or no, and IMO the 1% that cares is actually interested in what the scientists found, rather than what an artist is trying to “sell” [sic!].

• [steve white]

  weren’t these erroneous headline grabbing NASA press conferences being criticised for the last few years, I had hoped they were going to stop them.

• [vagabond2]

  I’ve had the pleasure to work with a number of traditional media space artists, and in fact was a member of the IAAA myself. But, like Jonah, I tend to not like these illustrations myself, though for different reasons. While I agree that they need to be used, I find that too often they are rushed and tend to look like they were lifted from games or the various space simulators that are available.
  Going back to my cave painting now…

• [Vaughn Stegeman]

  I’ve always wanted to do space illustration, but have no idea how to ‘break in’ as it were.

• [Daemonworks]

  A friend of mine has done a series of oil paintings of various nebulae and the like.
  http://vengshoel.com/wordpress/?page_id=317

• [UncaScrooge]

  I would not underestimate the power of these images.  Consider the history of the great Chesley Bonestell.

• [teapot]

  I didn’t notice the lighting problem on the planet until it was pointed out. Then it annoyed me too much.