Helix

White contains all colors while black is the absence of color.  That's what we learned in school.  In painting though, black is a color and it comes in various shades - or you can mix up your own custom shades.  Shades produced from 2 or more colors are called chromatic.  And that's the end of today's art lesson - which, most readers are thinking, is a good thing because they find the subject slightly less exciting than, well ......... watching paint dry.

On Cat's Eye I used flat mars black for the background.  The Helix background is a chromatic, consisting of dark blue, light dog crap (burnt sienna), and a dab of red.  Backgrounds don't come through well in photographs but viewed up close and personal, they make a considerable difference.  I'm using a different shade of black background on each of the nebula paintings.  When completed and grouped together on the wall, the different backgrounds should make the display more interesting.  To me, anyway.

Helix Nebula

Second in a series.

Acrylic on canvas; 16" x 20".

Helix, like Cat's Eye, is a planetary nebula, a star in it's death throes.  Helix may be the closest nebula to earth, a mere 650 light years away.  It's called Helix because astronomers think it's a trillion mile long tube and that, when viewed from earth, we're looking at it end on - looking right down the center of the tube.  How they came to this conclusion I haven't a clue.  Helix is large for a planetary nebula, somewhere in the 2-5 light year range in width.  Colorful little bugger.