Eye of the Sky

This was technically my first space painting that intentionally referenced real world hubble and james webb images  however i actually finished the second one Nativitas de Stellaris  before I finished this piece. After discovering the resemblance dragons brood nebula has to the fighting dragons of ara within the firebird nebula.

Anyway while checking out this coincidence I decided to browse Hubblesite.org images for more inspiration and the NGC4826 AKA the Messier 64 galaxy commonly called the black eye galaxy really stuck out at me and was one of the photos I immediately saved.

A few days later i  referenced these photos and decided to research the ones i picked and that’s when this Gem of a galaxy really stuck out to me. This galaxy has two counter-rotating disks likely caused from a merger with a gas-rich satellite galaxy in a retrograde orbit with which gave us the Unique Inner disk featured in this artwork

Also at 17Mly from earth this is a relatively distant galaxy and one that is very hard to capture in high detail  photographs making it the perfect specimen to do artistic interpretations of.

This interpretation is very stylized, i have given the whole piece a perspective shift from the original reference and made the inner gas disk significantly brighter than telescope and satellite photos would allow us to capture in order to show as much detail as possible.