For Halloween, NASA turns astronomy into movie posters

This week, NASA released several downloadable posters showing astronomical topics like vintage science fiction movies in their Galaxy of Horrors. It’s not the first time they’ve turned science into creative vintage posters, but making posters isn’t the only reason NASA regularly works with artists. Many of the images accompanying NASA’s official communications on space research are created by visualization experts.

In the Halloween poster series, NASA has transformed several astronomical phenomena into concepts for spooky holiday films. Dark matter is the title of a fictional film with the subtitle “there is something else out there”, while the galaxy MACS 2129-1 (which no longer forms new stars) provided the inspiration for a fictional film entitled Galactic Cemetery.

What is shown on the posters is directly inspired by real research. For example, the web on the Dark Matter poster is based on visualizations of the cosmic web.

The posters were created by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. They previously created the Exoplanet Travel Bureau, complete with vintage travel posters of planetary destinations outside the solar system. Like the Halloween posters, the destinations on the travel posters were all based on real research.

Turning scientific phenomena into movie posters may be just a little fun, but NASA regularly gets help from artists even when they share serious science data. Many of those beautiful images you see on their website, or accompanying news on exoplanetary research, are visualizations based on data collected from various NASA missions.

While some spacecraft can return actual photographic data, not all of the information gathered by NASA missions comes in the form of images. Often, it’s just the numbers that researchers need to interpret to understand what’s happening both inside and outside our galaxy. But NASA’s visualization studio can turn these numbers into images that represent information more visually. For example, they can make magnetic fields visible on the screen or show what a neutron star merger might look like.

Such images and videos make a great backdrop for presentations and scientific articles, but they can also help researchers think more visually about the collected data. When images are not based on actual visual data, visualization experts have some freedom to decide which colors they can use to make the image more informative, or even in which orientation to show an image. After all, up or down are just arbitrary directions in outer space.

But while most of the visualizations NASA creates are meant to be informative, NASA’s Galaxy of Horrors is just a little bit of fun and entertainment. The posters are intended as a fun way to learn new things about astronomical phenomena, and perhaps to get you in the spirit of Halloween in a year when you’re just as likely to visit a friend’s house as to take a trip to space.