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Instead of doing my actual job, I've spent the last few days making a cross-stitch reproduction of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's needlepoint of an X-ray image of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant.
Here is a thread (pun 100% intended) about this work... (1/7)
Here is a thread (pun 100% intended) about this work... (1/7)
(2/7) Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first person to use spectroscopy to measure the chemical compositions of stars. With this technique, she discovered that stars are mostly hydrogen! You can read a summary of this work here: https://astrobites.org/2018/12/03/the-stuff-of-stars/ (disclaimer: I wrote it)
(3/7) Her thesis, in which she makes this revolutionary proposition, has been called "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy." Payne-Gaposchkin was also the first woman dept chair @Harvard... and in her free time, she did needlepoint!
(4/7) This particular design is based on an X-ray image of the Cygnus Loop taken by @MIT astronomers (see image below, from a 1975 @sciam_cn issue; original paper here: http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979ApJ...227..285R/abstract) The Cygnus Loop is the remnant of the explosion of a massive star, called a supernova.
(5/7) Studies of the Cygnus Loop indicate that it's the remnant of a star ~12x the mass of our Sun, which exploded about ~10,000 yrs ago & produced an expanding shock wave. Here are some images in multiple wavelengths (not just X-ray!)--descriptions in alt text:
(6/7) The needlepoint pattern that Payne-Gaposchkin used was created using the largest civilian supercomputer at the time. She used a Scotch stitch with yarn on black canvas. Here are pictures of her pattern and materials (source: @HarvardArchives, http://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/4/archival_objects/1021816)
(7/7) My reproduction isn't perfect (I did cross-stitch using embroidery floss and white Aida cloth). But as someone who uses stellar spectroscopy to study supernovae, I thought it would be fitting to procrastinate on my actual work by paying homage to the pioneer of this field!
