Earlier this week, this year’s BICEP / Keck collaboration meeting was held at Harvard (we build, operate, and analyze data from cosmic microwave background telescopes installed at the South Pole). As a collaboration member at the host institution, I decided to bake some BICEP-themed cookies for a coffee break at the meeting, arriving at the idea of making butter cookies in the style of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies.
Although a variety of colormaps have previously been specifically developed for displaying cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps, none of these have been designed with perceptual uniformity or color-vision-deficiency (CVD) accessibility in mind. To improve upon this status quo, in support of publications1 for the 2022 data release for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), I used Matplotlib’s Viscm tool to develop a new diverging colormap that resembles the Planck colormap but is mostly perceptually uniform and is perceived similarly by both individuals with typical color vision and those with red or green color-vision deficiencies. The Q-band Stokes U map from the CLASS paper, which uses the new colormap, is shown below.
Y. Li et al., “CLASS Data Pipeline and Maps for 40 GHz Observations through 2022”, arXiv:2305.01045. ↩
For the baking contest at this year’s Center for Astrophysics barbecue, I made a blackberry pie containing a spiral galaxy made from a coconut pudding.1 The pie ingredients were mostly chosen based on color and texture, as well as to accommodate dietary restrictions of colleagues. To make the inset galaxy, I created a vector drawing based on the M51 galaxy, extruded it into a solid, and 3D printed the resulting shape out of PLA to form an insert, which extended all the way down to the bottom crust.
Although it ended up being a more general baking contest, the original email about the contest described it as a pie-baking contest, hence the pie. ↩
Now that I finally have a couch (and am living in an apartment big enough to comfortably fit one, unlike when I was in grad school), I decided I also needed a coffee table. Instead of just buying one, I decided to build one instead, with an astrophysics-related theme. To make construction without access to a woodworking shop easier, I sketched out a design based on square birch dowels, after which I selected a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Tarantula Nebula to use for the tabletop, and got to work building the table.
To get into the holiday spirit and in anticipation of the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),1 I decided to bake some gingerbread cookies in the shape of JWST’s primary mirror, which is comprised of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments. The cookies are 10 cm across, with hexagonal segments are 20 mm flat to flat, making them 1:66 scale replicas of the mirror.
The launch is scheduled for Christmas Day, as of writing. ↩
