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  Mecha Fighter Selenis!Feb 27, 2016 3:02 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Contributing to the A* Patreon campaign is a great way to support the comic, and you can even get monthly rewards sent directly from me! For instance, here's a monthly reward painting I did for a supporter some months back:
 
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Hm you know, that battle suit doesn't really look suited (oh man that was not meant as a pun) to fitting around Selenis' skeleton! I do get a little wild in these sketches sometimes, and draw highly improbable or even silly things that prrrrobably will never show up in the comic itself, just for fun ^_^
 
 
 
 
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  First fast radio burst source found!Feb 26, 2016 12:04 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Just a few days after I wrote about a huge upcoming radio telescope in China, and some background on A*'s discovery through radio waves, there's more radio telescope news! I needed two different articles to get the picture, but basically, last year a 64m radio telescope in Australia, using new software that analyzed readings in real time specifically for this purpose, detected and identified a fast radio burst, or "FRB": a strong radio pulse, lasting just milliseconds, with a dispersed signal—just the sort of signal that scientists would expect a radio wave traveling through vast stretches of intergalactic space to have, because electrons out there interfere with the lower end of the signal, making it arrive just a bit after the higher frequency part of the signal.
 
This same telescope in Australia, the Parkes telescope, detected an FRB in 2001 that initiated a search for such signals; the problem was, they would not be noticed until analyzing the telescope's record, long after the burst had been received (that 2001 burst wasn't noticed until analysis in 2007!), making it hard if not impossible to triangulate the source of the burst by comparing its arrival times at other telescopes around the globe. But this past year, with special software lying in wait to catch an FRB signal instantly, other radio telescopes around the globe were alerted, and able to scan for the burst's afterglow—which lasted for six days—within hours. Comparing the difference in arrival times of the burst at different points on the globe allowed the source of the burst to be triangulated, and when checked with an optical telescope, a distant galaxy was found along that vector—and its redshift could be measured, giving its distance: 6 billion light years away.
 
Knowing the distance, and the dispersion of the signal, scientists could then calculate the density of electrons (and presumably, matter they're attached to) lying between our galaxy and the source galaxy—and this matter density measured up to the 4-5% ordinary matter density (the rest theorized to be unknown stuff dubbed "dark matter" and "dark energy") predicated by prevailing cosmological theory—which is a nice confirmation for proponents of those theories to have, because up until now, only about half of that matter had been visible to our telescopes. People were probably worried it wasn't going to show up! But thanks to swift thinking and action by radio telescope researchers, it's been found!
 
And fast radio burst science just got a big kick in the pants: there's now a new thing these radio telescopes can find in the sky! This burst is thought to have resulted from a collision of neutron stars (this theory is supported in part to the mere millisecond length of the burst, and because the elliptical source galaxy appears to be old, meaning you would have more stars in their final stages, like neutron stars (or black holes?)) rather than a supernova or something, but radio wave bursts probably come from all sorts of heavy events—maybe even 10,000 per day coming in from every direction. So that's quite a bit of heavy astronomy to see—not to mention all that previously unseen intergalactic material to map!—and we may see a fresh wave (no pun intended) of radio telescope science coming our way, even beyond the one that's already been shaping up with worldwide arrays aiming to analyze Sgr A*!
 
 
 
 
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  Playin' it coolFeb 24, 2016 10:08 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:If there's one thing that's helping to keep me working on A* day after day, it's the contributions I get from readers through the A* Patreon campaign; I could definitely use some more help, though, and even just $1 a month from you would make a big difference to me! So if you're enjoying A*, please consider helping me keep it going. : D
 
Besides which, going for higher levels of support gets you rewards each and every month sent directly from me to you. Here's a sketch I sent to a reader for their support in one of these past months:
 
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Just chillin'!
 
 
 
 
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  Rush rush rushFeb 23, 2016 10:42 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I'm running late tonight so no blogging for moi. Maybe someone will bid on today's painting though >_? ^-^ <_< v-v Oh yeah also I will have a new show of A* art here in Seattle that goes up this weekend, so I will be able to tell you all about that on Monday.
 
 
 
 
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  A*'s "Broadcast to the Universe"Feb 22, 2016 10:33 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:"China to relocate 10,000 people to make way for telescope" said the BBC last week: China wants to clear a 5 kilometer radius around the site of their planned 500m-wide radio telescope to reduce potential interference from terrestrial sources. They say the radio telescope, which will be way larger than the current largest, a 300m radio telescope in Puerto Rico, will be used to help search for extraterrestrial life; radio telescopes are also pretty good for looking at the galactic core where A* is, though, though, because radio wavelengths, longer than visible wavelengths and thus more leisurely in their vibrations, slip between particles of interstellar dust more readily than more energetic parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and thus have a greater chance of reaching the Earth for us to see—and there's an awful lot of dust between us and the core.
 
If you want to know more about radio telescopes, well it just so happens that in the past week I came across this little one-page edutainment story in Charlton Comics' Space Adventures #15 from March, 1955 (artist and writer unknown):
 
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Boy, with a 500m 'scope, China will be able to pick up those hostile space fleets from the Moon really easy! A*, though, would not have been one of the observed "stars" "emitting high frequency radiation" back then—its radio signal wasn't identified until 1974 (hey that's the year I was born—-HMMM!), by Bruce Balick and Robert Brown; "The name Sgr A* was coined by Brown in a 1982 paper because the radio source was 'exciting', and excited states of atoms are denoted with asterisks" (from Wikipedia). Earlier names for A* from others, that didn't stick, included "GCCRS" ("Galactic Center Compact Radio Source") and "Sgr A(cn)" (for "Compact Non-thermal"); you can read about those in "The Discovery of Sgr A*," Brown and others' rather exciting scientific account of the four-year search for the black hole at the center of our galaxy after a chance detection of a radio source there in 1970.
 
 
 
 
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  In a sketchy mood!Feb 19, 2016 11:13 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:If you enjoy this comic and want me to be able to keep bringing you wacky space adventures day in and day out for pretty much ever, then check out the A* Patreon campaign! That's an easy way to send me a little money automatically each month to help me stay at my drawing board; a bunch of readers are helping me out that way and it makes a big difference! You can make it just a buck a month, that would be fantastic! Folks who are wild enough to send more can get me to send *them* rewards each and every month; for instance, I sent this sketch to a reader a little while back for their contribution of $10 in the previous month:
 
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Yeah! Thank you very much, and thanks everyone for reading the comic, that helps too! : D
 
 
 
 
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  Biggest black holes & stranger thingsFeb 19, 2016 12:51 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Thanks to a couple readers for sending me links to various articles (this story really got around!) on a new mass estimate for the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy NGC 4889, 308 million light years from Earth. Most of the articles suggested or even said that this black hole was the biggest one ever found, but it isn't; according to Wikipedia's list of most massive black holes, NGC 4889's 21 billion solar mass black hole ranks in at number 5.
 
The ESA's original news release on the weighing of NGC 4889's black hole is here; it mentions that its mass was estimated by measuring the velocity of stars moving around it—this is the same way that the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the black hole known as Sagittarius A*, was discovered and weighed (at a comparatively minuscule 4 million solar masses): in 2002, star S2 ("Source 2") was observed moving as close as 17 light-hours to the central mass, and by the end of 2008, a total of 16 years of observing it and other stars moving around the center revealed S2's orbit, mass, and velocity, and from that, scientists were able to calculate that the gravity necessary to whip the star around in an elliptical orbit at speeds exceeding 5000 kilometers per second (11 million miles per hour, 1.67% the speed of light—"the fastest known ballistic orbit") could only be generated by an extremely compact mass of about 4 million Suns—and that could only be a supermassive black hole.
 
S2 takes 15.5 years to complete its orbit around A*. In 2012, a much fainter star was noticed in an even tighter orbit around the black hole: S102 completes its orbit in just 11.5 years. And I found something else I hadn't known in S2's Wikipedia article: "it is believed that there are thousands of stars, as well as dark stellar remnants (stellar black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs) distributed in the volume through which S2 moves." So even though science had only charted the orbits of 28 or so stars around A* as of 2008, the very center of the galactic core is thought to be a much busier place than we can currently see; a close study of the motions of the stars there that we can see can potentially start picking out some of these other objects, as they should cause slight perturbations in their orbits.
 
Oh, and I do recommend looking through that list of the most massive black holes, it's pretty interesting. More and more will be found all the time, of course, but the current chart-topper is the cryptically named S5 0014+81, the estimated 40 billion solar mass black hole at the center of a blazar—a very compact quasar, the huge radio-wave-emitting storm at the center of a galaxy whose central black hole is actively sucking down vast quantities of material: S5 0014+81 is thought to be swallowing 4000 Suns worth of material each year! The energy radiating out of the storm of hypervelocity material swirling around it renders it "25 thousand times as luminous as all the 100 to 400 billion stars of the Milky Way Galaxy combined, making it one of the most powerful objects in the universe"—but it can only be seen through telescopes because it is 12.1 billion light years away from us—and this means that it is also very old (the universe as a whole being only about 14 billion years old), which "suggests that supermassive black holes grow up very quickly." (It should be noted, mind you, that estimating the hole's mass from the light emitting from its accretion disc is less reliable than estimating the mass by the orbital velocity of objects around it, so its 40 billion solar mass weight is a less reliable figure than the ones for many of the black holes on the chart below it.)
 
But there's lots of other cool stuff in that list, for instance the estimated 10 billion solar mass black hole at the center of galaxy MS 0735.6+7421 has been causing an eruption of huge wings of hot gas for the last 100 million years; the clouds of gas and the detected gamma ray bursts from this storm are so large that if the eruption has been caused by material accreting into the black hole, the amount of material needed would be equivalent to 600 million Suns! However, the eruption could possibly have been caused by the rotation of the black hole.
 
And there's the 4 billion solar mass black hole at the center of the Hercules A galaxy, shooting out plasma jets over 1 million light years in length! (Cool composite visible light / radio wave photo picture there.) (The mere 55 million mass hole in Galaxy Centaurus A powers jets that long as well; material shoots along them at 50% light speed!)
 
And while the big blazar mentioned above is pretty far away, the 2 billion solar mass black hole at the center of quasar ULAS J1120+0641 has a comoving distance of 28.85 billion light years! That's possible, even though the galaxy is under 14 billion years old and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, because the universe is also expanding at all points in all directions: so, while the light has really only traveled 12.9 billion light years as we measure light years today, since it was emitted from the quasar, "less than 770 million years after the Big Bang, about 13 billion years ago," that 12.9 billion light year distance has expanded along with the rest of the universe, so the quasar today is actually 28.85 billion light years away, making it the most distant and earliest quasar known, and quite an item of interest for theories about the Big Bang, because it is so old that it would have been around before the universe became ionized, and light could move around freely—indeed, this and other quasars could have been prime movers in that theorized "reionization" of the universe, the end of the "Cosmic Dark Ages." It also may help explain its unusual composition: while other quasars (even the next oldest, just 100 million years younger) have less than 1% of their hydrogen in a neutral, non-ionized state, ULAS J1120+0641 contains 10 to 50% neutral hydrogen, and no noticeable quantity of metals that would have formed after the initial Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which suggests that it was "embedded in a protogalaxy in the midst of forming, [...] or a pre-protogalaxy core still embedded in the primordial hydrogen fog," maybe just in the process of generating what would be the universe's first stars.
 
(Incidentally, if you want to see an even older galaxy (but not a quasar), here's one that's 30 billion light years away. The light from this one is so old—13.1 billion years—that it would have been generated at the tail end of those "Cosmic Dark Ages," and thus would normally have been absorbed in the primordial plasma, not surviving to reach our eyes; one theory is that the light had some help, and a nearby "population of smaller, undetected galaxies, contributed to the reionization."
 
Using the gravitational lensing effect of intervening galaxy clusters, the Hubble Space Telescope has also spotted what may be an even more distance galaxy, MACS0647-JD, but could only estimate its distance by the rather crude technique of photometric redshift, which judges the expansion of its light by a broad range of colors, as opposed to more refined spectrographic analysis, which could break the light down into unique elemental signatures, whose shift could be much more precisely measured; confirmation of that galaxy's distance, and further detection of "galaxies more than 13.4 billion light years away, less than 300 million years after the Big Bang," cannot be accomplished by Hubble, and requires the improved low-wavelength detection that will provided by Hubble's successor, the infrared-specializing James Webb Telescope, due in 2018—only two years away, now!)
 
 
 
 
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  I think Amazon could use a new lookFeb 17, 2016 10:18 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Here's another monthly reward sketch that I sent to a reader who's been helping to keep the comic coming to you each and every week by supporting me through A*'s Patreon campaign :")) :
 
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Thanks to everyone who's doing that! Even a buck or two a month makes a big difference : D
 
 
 
 
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  'Cause columns are classy, that's whyFeb 16, 2016 10:39 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I have A*'s readers to thank for keeping this comic going, and one big way they do that is by signing up to contribute a buck or two (or even more in some cases!) to the development of the comic each month, and that's handled through the handy-dandy A* Patreon campaign. Yes, sir, it makes a big difference, and I get to show my appreciation by sending out rewards in return! For instance, here's a sketch I mailed off to a big contributor some time back as their reward for another month of helping the comic (yes I send them a new sketch each and every month : ):
 
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Thank you!!
 
 
 
 
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  Thanks rich guysFeb 15, 2016 10:13 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Over the weekend I got all the non-super-contrast-enhanced watercolor pages, basically from episode 22, page 92 up through the current episode, re-done with the smoother processing method I've been using on new pages since a few weeks ago, so browsing back through the story now should be easier on the eyes and even a bit faster, since without all the enhanced surface noise of the watercolor paper that was there before, the image files are slightly more compact in terms of download size. Huzzah!
 
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You know, what with all the super moguls getting heavily into the commercial space biz of late—we've got Elon Musk and Richard Branson and a few billionaires from Google, at least—one of the thornier parts of the A* backstory that you haven't seen yet has kind of worked itself out! I mean, seven years ago I came up with this scheme for how people from Earth ended up in the galactic core, 26,000 light years away, and I wasn't quite sure how the nitty gritty details of the very beginning of it were going to work, but, it turns out, history itself soon came to my rescue. So I was a few years ahead of my time—not that I can say I predicted this thing that I'm leaving vague here so I don't spoil it, exactly, but it very conveniently explains how the earliest part of A*'s own fictional history could happen; because if it hadn't happened quite that way yet, people might have told me it was far-fetched, because even though some of these commercial space companies were around back then, I guess, they hadn't really started showing actual space capability, and thus weren't really on the radar, as it were. Okay, not on *my* radar. ... So a smarter person would have been able to tell me back then that this was already happening. But *I* didn't know that, and I thought my story point was a little far-fetched! But now it isn't, as even I myself now know, so, thanks, history! : D And I guess you super space moguls too.
 
 
 
 
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  Painting, gravitational waves, Philae finaleFeb 13, 2016 2:34 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:My readers keep A* going by supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign! And I get to send them rewards, for instance here's a monthly reward painting I did for a supporter a few months back:
 
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Thank you!!
 
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Now that a day has passed and everyone's a little calmer after the big announcement yesterday of the first ever detection of gravitational waves and a binary black hole (among other firsts), the BBC has a calmer and more coherent article about the breakthrough, which ties things together pretty well.
 
They've also got an article called Ground control bids farewell to Philae comet lander, in which it is revealed that the ESA mission team has given the Philae lander up for lost after not hearing from it since last summer; it had been hoped that with Comet 67P nearing its closest approach to the Sun, some light and heat would reach the little lander in whatever trench it had bounced into on the comet's surface after its rocky landing, and allow it to wake up; that never happened, and now, with the comet moving away from the Sun, there's little hope that it ever will. Indeed, temperatures in the shade there are cold enough to warp and snap some of the lander's components, and, furthermore, by now certain internal parts of the machine that needed to retain a little heat in order to function—"including the onboard computer and the communications unit"—will have lost that heat, and no longer be operable, even if by some miracle a beam of light managed to strike one of its solar panels—which are by now probably coated in comet dust. So farewell, Philae! You were the first cometary lander in human history, and although your bumpy landing didn't allow you to run all the experiments that had been hoped for, it may help pave the way for many more to come. And Philae's mother ship, Rosetta, continues to explore the comet from orbit. Big things are hoped for particularly in September, when the probe will spiral down for its own landing on the comet's treacherous surface.
 
 
 
 
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  Gravitational waves seen! Black holes merge!Feb 12, 2016 2:36 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:You may not have noticed the space warp that swept through Earth and its environs on September 14th of last year, but two arrays of perpendicularly oriented, twin 4-km-long laser beams in the world's largest vacuum chambers, bouncing off mirrors suspended from a quadruple pendulum system by fused glass fibers only a few hair's-breadths thick in order to mute any vibration, even the natural vibrations of the molecules in the mirrors themselves, *did*: the signal they recorded, a simple line graph, matched the waveform predicted by Einstein's equations derived from his theory of relativity for the minute squashing and stretching of space—warping by a distance equivalent to only about 0.4% of a single proton's diameter along that whole 4 km beam—consistent with the force unleashed by two black holes of about 36 and 29 times the mass of the Sun, 1.3 billion light years from Earth, spiralling around each other 250 times a second before colliding at over half the speed of light, all in 0.2 seconds, to form a new black hole of 62 solar masses; the remaining three solar masses converted into that released force of the detected gravitational waves which, at their peak, equaled "50 times the total output power of the stars in the Universe at the time."
 
This was the first detection of a long-theorized binary black hole system, the first observation of a binary black hole merger, the first indication of a stellar-mass black hole of over 30 solar masses, and the first detection of gravitational waves, ripples that Einstein, in 1916, predicted would propagate outward across the universe from any such tremendous and sudden displacement of mass. He thought we would not be able to detect their extremely minute flexing of the space and time around us, but 100 years later, the twin LIGO ("Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory")arrays, one in Hanford, Washington, the other in Livingston, Louisiana, newly switched on after a lengthy upgrade process that saw them achieve a four-fold increase in sensitivity—they had been running, with no detections, since 2002—and not even yet due to resume their formal search for gravitational wave disturbances for four more days—did, and that detection means that we have a new way of looking at the universe, one that can, if refined and sensitive enough—more detectors around the world will improve the detection capability; the upcoming Virgo array in Italy, for instance, will provide a third detection spot, enabling triangulation of the source of detected gravitational waves, and continuing upgrades to the two LIGO arrays are expected to improve their individual detection capabilities by a further factor of 2.5 by the end of the decade—can potentially look past the light-opacity of the first 379,000 years of our universe—it took that long for the universe to cool to the point that atoms could form, reflecting rather than absorbing radiation and thus converting the universe from an opaque plasma to space through which those photons could travel, allowing them, eventually, to reach our telescopes as the oldest detectable light, cosmic microwave background radiation—all the way back to the very beginning, time zero, the Big Bang.
 
The measurements already taken of the merging of the new black hole open up a whole new era of black hole research, where the fundamental activity of black holes—gravitation—can be "seen" through the gravitational waves they propagate; dramatic events involving other massive bodies, such as neutron stars, may also become visible to the detectors. The readings provide yet another confirmation of at least an extremely low mass for the theoretical quantum particle of gravitation, the graviton, which, like the photon for light, is theorized to propagate across the universe at the speed of light, but without the interference—interposing dust, gas, gravity, and so forth—to which light is subject. In fact—or rather, in theory—gravitons interact with matter at such a low rate that actually detecting an individual particle is thought to be so unlikely as to be effectively impossible: even a detector with the mass of Jupiter, operating at 100% efficiency and in orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to spot a single graviton once every 10 years. Still, the new ability to observe gravitational waves—in theory made up of many gravitons—could help us better understand what properties such a particle would have, and in so doing perhaps even help fill the gap in our major scientific theories between the very large—relativity—and the very small—quantum mechanics.
 
New conclusions and ideas about black holes themselves can already be drawn from the new data: scientists had not been certain that stellar-mass black holes over 30 solar masses could form, for instance, or that binary black holes actually merge, and the dynamics of black hole formation suggest that perhaps this could have occurred in a relatively rare type of low-mass galaxy with a young population of stars. Since we now know that binary black hole mergers DO occur—at least once, and shortly after the September 14th event, LIGO picked up a weaker signal that was probably also from black holes; in all, LIGO detected at least four events in its first run, from September through January; it will reactivate for a second run in the summer—theories of black hole formation that said they do not form through such events in any rate of time we can measure can be more or less discarded, which helps direct further theorizing along what should be more fruitful lines; the detection of the merger also enables scientists to start making estimates as to how often such events might take place in our area of the universe (LIGO can detect mergers up to about 4.25 billion light years away, and a warping of their 4-km-beams as small as 0.01% of a proton's diameter; also interesting to note: the LIGO detectors were listening in on a frequency capable of detecting mergers of black holes between 1 and 99 solar masses, and a combined mass of no more than 100 solar masses).
 
Well, for a black hole-based blog, this was super-exciting. : ) The BBC was so excited about it that they wrote at least three articles on it that I saw: here, here, and here. A reader sent me the link to The New York Times' thorough article, touching on many other details here. The actual research paper on the detection from the LIGO team, with some nifty charts and graphs showing what they saw, is here, and their draft of a yet-unpublished paper outlining the astrophysical implications of the detection is here (pdf format).
 
 
 
 
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  Canada counts as abroad! Ask USPSFeb 10, 2016 9:55 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Gotta go box up a piece of A* original art to send abroad tomorrow morning! There will be plastic wrap and cardboard and loads and loads of tape. I know that's sort of boring but it's what I do some of the time : D
 
 
 
 
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  Hey look an abstract thing right thereFeb 09, 2016 11:00 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Perfunctory-only blogging for me tonight; I stayed up too late last night making little abstract paintings out of pieces of the background of yesterday's page
 
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like so ^ and posting them on my Instagram and tumblr, where people seem to like weird little thingies like that. ^_^
 
 
 
 
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  Deluded undiluted inking!Feb 08, 2016 10:31 PM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Each month, I get to send out rewards to folks contributing to the A* Patreon campaign, a monthly fund consisting entirely of voluntary contributions from A* readers, which helps keep me housed and fed while I work on the comic—for which, you can imagine, I'm very appreciative! So it's a real pleasure to be able to give some rewards in return; over the weekend I e-mailed out the brand new episode 27 e-book to supporters at the e-book support levels, and here's an ink sketch I snail-mailed off to a reader some months back (I just realized I have a backlog of like 55 of these to show off in the blog—and another 12 or so I still have to draw and mail out in order to catch up to the latest month of rewards, I think...so I'd better start showing these off to the rest of you faster than I have been!) for helping to support A* through Patreon that month:
 
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Patreon sketches are pretty much my sole ink practice these days, too, so that's another reason to enjoy doing them. Another thing I just realized is that, what with the infrequent ink work and all, I forgot about the discovery I made a while back (I think it was when preparing to ink this gallery piece), that if I add some water to the ink I can do more flowy lines with it, without even making it significantly less black-looking. Maybe I'll try playing with that again for the next sketch...or maybe the ol' unadulterated, thick'n'chunky ink will work better for whatever the sketch is showing. More likely, I'll probably just forget about the water-adding trick again!
 
 
 
 
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  Sketchin' that sci-fi chicFeb 06, 2016 2:55 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:It's a new month and that means a new round of monthly rewards for the lovely readers supporting the comic through the A* Patreon campaign : ). I'm a little behind on sketches—hopefully I'll get some catching up on those in in the next two weekends after this one : P ^_^—but over *this* weekend I ought to be able to get out the next wave of e-book rewards. The support I get through Patreon makes a huge difference in my being able to keep making this comic day in and day out, so thank you everyone who's helping me with that! Here's a sketch I sent to a reader some time back as their reward for supporting the comic through Patreon in that month:
 
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Thank you, and thanks for reading! Have a nice weekend!
 
(Oh yeah, I hope to get some reprocessing of the older watercolor comics in this weekend to get them rendered out in the smoother new mode I came up with a week ago. One tweak I made to that since I talked about it before was going back to saving the comics at the same jpeg detail level I've always used, rather than the much higher detail one I was using for a few days there—it was doubling the comic file sizes for what turned out to be almost no visual difference at all—except maybe on that one page from last Friday of the fortress in daytime that was unusually light and low in contrast. So uh yeah that was a bad idea. : P)
 
 
 
 
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  But I still miss the Bud Bowl : PFeb 05, 2016 2:53 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:This Sunday sees the sporting event known as the "Super Bowl"! Despite the similarity in names and host galaxy, it is not actually directly related to Supermassive Black Hole A*—but the coincidence probably doesn't hurt its popularity.
 
 
 
 
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  Lux. space mining; supermassive jet mysteryFeb 04, 2016 1:47 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Luxembourg to support space mining (BBC): Luxembourg's government wants to take the lead in getting a European asteroid mining operation underway, after several American commercial ventures were announced last year. The Luxembourg government will be looking to fund companies and R & D into the appropriate technologies; the article points out that Luxembourg isn't new when it comes to space: they host SES, "the world's largest commercial satellite telecommunications company." There was also this interesting discussion of considerations of international law in space mining: "Last year, their activities [of the hopeful American commercial space mining companies] were bolstered by US legislation that sought to cement the rights of any American operations that started to exploit asteroids. Some commentators at the time suggested this legislation might contravene the UN's Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967. But Luxembourg's economic minister, Etienne Schneider, is relaxed about the move. 'These rules prohibit the appropriation of space and celestial bodies but they do not exclude the appropriation of materials which can be found there,' he said. 'Roughly, the situation is equivalent to the rights of a trawler in international waters. Fishermen own the fish they catch but they do not own the ocean.'"
 
Black hole's twin jets shine bright, somehow (BBC): The active supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Pictor A, 500 million light years away, is firing a jet of material moving at near light speed from both of its poles; the jet firing somewhat in our direction is "long enough to cross the Milky Way three times" (that would be 300,000 light years, I guess); the one firing in the opposite direction is moving so quickly away from us that it was very dim and hard to detect: "'It's like the Doppler effect only more so,' said Prof Hardcastle. 'In special relativity it actually effects the amplitude as well as the frequency of the emission.'" The jets are blowing huge hot bubbles in the thin intergalactic medium around them, and there's also a "hotspot" visible at the end of the nearer jet, where "the material first piles up in collision with that medium." But what really puzzles the scientists is why the jets themselves are visible (radiating X-rays): "the light we can see shining from the twin jets is apparently produced by electrons spinning around in very small circles. Just like what happens when electrons are piped around in much bigger circles in a synchrotron, here on Earth, that motion produces radiation in the form of bright X-rays. But a mystery remains, because the electrons must be re-accelerated along the length of the jet; the mighty shove delivered back at the black hole is not enough. 'Everywhere you see light, you've got some sort of process that's taking energy out of the jet and dumping it into those very high-energy electrons,' Prof Hardcastle said. 'We don't know what that is. But we can study the process in Pictor A much better than anywhere else.'"
 
 
 
 
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  Small stars, big dripFeb 03, 2016 12:56 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I've been thinning my white ink more and more for the spattered-on stars in the last couple pages, because I wanted them to be smaller and less opaque than usual, so they'd be fainter and less of a distraction from the rest of the scene, which has already been a little busy without having to worry about stars gleaming all over it. The thinned-out ink produces a pretty nifty effect with its fine spatter, I'll have to use that more. Hadn't quite figured on just how much it can lead the ink to run off the nib in big drips, though—as the large white splotch in the upper middle part of the right-hand sky area of this page can attest. : P
 
 
 
 
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  More natural A* flavorFeb 02, 2016 12:41 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:While working on a watercolor commission for a reader over the weekend (yeah I need to add commission info to the 'store' page at some point...basically it's $25/hour, and you have to be patient with me since I may have only an hour so to work on a single commission per week—and that's kind of in a good week : P—but I do get 'em done eventually, and anyway just email me at smbhax@gmail.com if you have an idea of something you'd like to have me paint for you), I realized that my usual way of preparing the scan of a watercolor image—for the daily A* pages, I mean—wasn't quite as accurate a representation of the painting as maybe could be. So I played around in Photoshop a bit and came up with a new processing process for them, which you can see in today's page (and the previous day's page, since I still had the layers for that one laying around so I was able to go back and give it the same process). Hopefully it looks smoother and a little easier to look at. They *will* take about 30% longer to download this way, though, because in order to preserve the detail at these lower contrast settings, I have to save them at a higher fidelity, so the image file sizes are heftier.
 
Here's a comparison: the result of the old process (top) vs the new process (bottom) on today's page:
 
Image
Image
 
The bottom (new process) one looks a lot more like the actual painting looks in real life, preserves more of the natural gradient and so forth, and also happens to look nicer than the more processed (top, old) version—I think! Anyway if I don't change my mind about this in the next week or so I'll have to go back and reprocess all the old watercolor pages this way (although I won't be able to lighten them up really, just un-noisify them), just like I did uh just a few months ago when I sharpened things up vs the old, old process. : P
 
(The technical Photoshop stuff: the old process started with a .75 gamma reduction on the scan, and ended with an Sharpen More faded to 88% opacity; the new process omits any gamma changes, and uses Unsharp Mask 500%, Radius 0.3, Threshold 10: this yields a reduced but more natural contrast (without the gamma, I mean), and prevents the sharpening from making a whole lot of noise out of the grain of the watercolor paper.)
 
(Silly Photoshop stuff: in my ancient Photoshop 4, when using Unsharp Mask in a macro, you actually have to bump the Radius up 0.1 over your real value, because some little bug causes the batch to run the Mask at 0.1 less Radius than what you entered : P; and I'm saving these at jpeg compression setting "8" (in the "Maximum" range), vs the old setting of "6" (in the "High" range); I forget what 6 works out to being in modern Photoshop jpeg percentages, and I'll have to figure out what "8" approximately equates to whenever I go and use my newer version of Photoshop to batch process all the old pages into this new gamma/sharpening scheme.)
 
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Not directly related, but just confirming, as I mentioned in a few previous blog entries, that starting with today's page I've bumped up the starting price for the auctions of these daily pages (link at the lower left corner of the comic image) to $12.99 to help cover the increased costs of art supplies and a lot of the other stuff involved, vs what they were when I started auctioning these years ago at $9.99—it was getting close to not even breaking even just in terms of the materials involved selling 'em at that price anymore, so obviously that was a little silly. : P A big thanks to everyone who has bid on my little paintings, and I hope you'll consider doing so again if you see one you like. : )
 
 
 
 
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