Trappist artist

Today NASA announced the discovery of 7 planets orbiting the star Trappist-1.

'All of these seven planets could have liquid water - key to life as we know it - under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.'

They're also close enough so that looking up from the surface of one, you could see the other 6 hanging in the sky some the size of our moon.

I don't think the view from the furthest world would look like this as its not one of the ones in the Goldilocks zone, and the sun would be 10 times larger.

However, with an orbit in the region of days, these worlds and their star-field would shift across the sky in minutes and hours rather than the entire night that it takes our moon to move from one horizon to the other. It would be majestic.

NASA claim that they will be able to detect an atmosphere of oxygen sometime in the next few years using information from Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.

Get to it, Science!

Locals vs Aliens

Its rare that I'll sit down with the intention of producing some traditional looking landscape paintings, but after a few months of winter with the dramatic lighting that comes with it, I was inspired enough to do just that.

Wharfedale's Almscliffe Crag and the Cow and Calf Rocks on the edge of Ilkley moor, were the inspiration for these paintings.

However, not content with depicting the awesome majesty of nature, I felt the need to add spaceships. Its a well known scientific fact that spaceships make pretty much everything 23% better, so it seemed foolish not to exploit this.