Voyager

Voyager - ArtBlocks 500 Collection

Voyager is part of the ArtBlocks 500 collection (drop occurred on April 17th 2023).

Available only on the secondary market :

Voyager on ArtBlocks

Voyager on OpenSea

Voyager on Verse

Voyager on Raster

Inspiration

Voyager 1&2 have been launched in 1977. They were sent to explore the 4 giant gaseous planet of our solar system, thanks to an alignment configuration available once every 175 years. Wikipedia 

Io and Europa moons with Jupiter

Voyager 2. Feb. 1979. NASA/JPL.

This image is the inspirational source of my project. A giant planet, moons with the size of our Earth looking so small... giving the scale of the Jupiter planet.

I was 6... when this image has been taken. Real people have discovered this image for the first time...

I want to give the same feeling with my project... to give the feeling to discover the first image of a new world for the first time. In fact, you'll not get a single image, but many different views of your planetary system (thanks to the liveMode, see below).

Voyager is a pass ticket giving access to infinite views of your planetary system...

NARRATIVE 

Voyager 1&2 are the farthest objects from Earth created by man. Now travelling at the speed of 17km/s, it will require tens of thousands years at least for it to reach other system.

In "Voyager", I imagine Voyager approaches a planet and its moons and send back the image to Earth.

In reality, they will never approach anything close enough to be capture by camera by far. Distances in the Universe are difficult to apprehend.

FEATURES : Mission Phase

The "Mission phase" features gives an information on the distance to the planet.

I used the NASA description of the different phases : NASA Phase Description 

In a flyby operation, Observatory phase (OB) begins when the target can be better resolved in the spacecraft's optical instruments than it can from Earth-based instruments. This phase generally begins a few months prior to the date of flyby. OB is marked by the spacecraft being for the first time completely involved in making observations of its target (rather than cruise activities), and ground resources are completely operational in support of the encounter. The start of this phase marks the end of the interplanetary cruise phase.  (...)

Far Encounter phase (FE) begins when the full disc of a planet can no longer fit within the field of view of the instruments. Observations are designed to accommodate parts of the planet rather than the whole disc, and to take best advantage of the higher resolution available. (...)

Near Encounter phase (NE) includes the period of closest approach to the target. It is marked by intensely active observations with all of the spacecraft's science experiments, including onboard instruments and radio science investigations. It includes the opportunity to obtain the highest resolution data about the target. (...)

Observatory (far)     Observatory

FEATURES : SPACE

Standard space environment consists on a dark sky with some stars placed randomly.

There are 3 types of feature family that have an impact on the visual layout :

• Milky Way, Nebula and Cluster

• Small features (Eclipse, Comet...)

• Gravitational Wave

Milky Way

Milky Way is the view of our galaxy as we can see it in clear nights. It's a compound of gaseous parts with bright star population.

Nebula

Nebula is composed of gas that blocks light (and appears dark) or diffuses light (and appears bright). 44 editions contain a Nebula.

Cluster

Cluster comes with 2 possibilities : Hyades (19 editions) and Coma Berenice (23 editions). These are 2 closests star clusters. They contain lots of stars... I interpreted this with dust like structure and more stars. The difference between the two is light (depends on parameters, but Hyades is little more extreme than Coma Berenice).

Small features.

• White dwarf : fading core of a star, not too luminous => Wikipedia 

• Eclipse

• Supernova : star explosion => Wikipedia 

• Comet

• Einstein Ring : a complex structure => Wikipedia 

• Einstein Cross : same origin => Wikipedia 

• Magellanic Clouds : the two dwarf galaxies visible with the naked eye (southern hemisphere) => Wikipedia 

• Nova : a bright event affecting a white dwarf => Wikipedia 

• Unknown structure

• Unclassified : probably an asteroid, but not sure... 

Disclaimer : some objects look real (comet, eclipse, Magellanic clouds...) some have been enlarged to be seen given the scale (Einstein ring and cross, asteroid like), some are just creative interpretation but would not look like that (nova, supernova...) and some have never been seen...

Above : the objects in the Voyager artwork. Below : real images of the same objects (the astrophysical scale is not respected, Einstein cross and rings should be so small you can't see them giving the camera aperture).

FEATURES : Colors

Voyager contains 237 Monochromatic and 63 Bichromatic editions. Blue for Cold planets, Red-Orange for Warm planets and Red for Hot planets.

FEATURES : Planet Category

I followed a nomenclature used to characterize exoplanets (and added a few style myself like TransNeptunian).
TransNeptunians, Neptunians and Jovians are gaseous planets. Jovian contains stripes like Jupiter while Neptunian are homogeneous.
All other are Telluric planets. I've decided to give the names to the ones that look more what I imagined they could be.

Cold, Warm and Hot are usually related to the scale of the noise I used to create their texture (colder => larger scale and hotter => smaller scalle). For Jovian, the hotter, the larger the number of stripes.
There is no physics, just my inspiration on what they could look like.

Gaseous planets

Telluric planet

Interactivity

There are two ways to interact with your Voyager edition.

Directly, thanks to the ArtBlocks website (see Interactive Guide for details and the PDF version).

The other possibility is the best for intensive exploration and the massive production of high resolution images. It works with a python script that interacts directly with the original ArtBlocks Voyager code stored forever in the Ethereum blockchain (see Python Exploration Guide for details).

High Resolution

Voyager is not meant to be experienced through the technological limitations of 2020, but at the highest resolution the technology of each era can deliver. A rendering that takes 30 minutes of CPU time today might take just 2 minutes in 2050, assuming continued progress in computing performance. And why stop there? The higher the resolution, the more Voyager reveals: finer structures, richer details, and subtleties that remain hidden at lower resolutions. Voyager is an artwork meant to grow with technology, inviting you to revisit it over time and discover ever more of what was always there, waiting to emerge.

Most images displayed on this webpage have been using DP=6, with a 5400 × 8100 resolution.
Here a comparison of original and high resolution images: