Van Gogh's Starry Night as you've never seen it before: Astronomy student creates mosaic using Hubble's best deep space pictures




It is one of the most famous paintings in the history of art - and here it is with our most famous photographs of space.



Alex Parker, a PHD astronomy student took Van Gogh's 1889 painting, and built it back up from arguably humanity's other most famous space portraits - those taken by the Hubble telescope over the last 20 years.

The student used computer mosaic-making software to re-produce the artwork, after cloudy weather stopped him exploring the real thing at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The astronomer, whose speciality is exploring the asteroids and proto-planets of our solar system, downloaded Hubble's Top 100 Images to create this new take on Van Gogh's masterpiece.

The Starry Night (De Sterrennacht) by Van Gogh gets a universal treatment by astonomy PhD student Alex Harrison Parker

A deep zoom: A portion of the mosaic of Van Gogh's painting reveals the images used to re-create the portrait He told Discovery News: 'The idea came up around the time of Hubble’s 22nd birthday, when I thought it would be neat to assemble a collage of a bunch of Hubble images from over its history. 'Observing can be all over the map - You will be shut out by clouds on some nights, have to evacuate the mountain because of high winds and ice on other nights, and other times there isn't a moment to pause because you're taking data at such a high rate all night.' RELATED ARTICLES Previous

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Next Peering into the Dark Ages of space: Hubble goes to extremes... Share this article Share When he is not carrying out observations, he likes to study the asteroids and proto-planets of the early solar system, helping to expand our knowledge of how the solar system formed. This is also not his first project using space data to create a visual effect, having also created animations of the known asteroids within our local region of space. A Hubble Deep Zoom: These are some of the images contained within Alex Parker's mosaic:

The Pillars of Creation: These are 'Evaporating Gaseous Globules' - columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars

The Carina Nebula: This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien¿s The Lord of the Rings. Hubble captured the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars

It's full of stars: Several hundred galaxies are visible in this 'deepest-ever' view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field