Walking home through Maynooth this evening, the streets filled with partying students, I was reminded of this:
It’s the central part of the triptych Das letzte Gericht (The Last Judgment) by Hieronymus Bosch. The medium is oil on oak panel and it measures 164 x 127 cm. The original work is in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The figures at the top, looking down on the chaos, are clearly identifiable as members of academic staff, while those below are students. I’m sure that if Christmas jumpers had been invented in 1486, when the work is thought to have been completed, Bosch would have painted a few in…
I haven’t posted anything recently about the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, but I can remedy that by passing on a new image with text from the accompanying press release. This is actually just one of a batch of new science results emerging from the first `Quick Release’ (Q1) data; I blogged about the first set of Q1 results here.
Image description: The focus of the image is a portion of LDN 1641, an interstellar nebula in the constellation of Orion. In this view, a deep-black background is sprinkled with a multitude of dots (stars) of different sizes and shades of bright white. Across the sea of stars, a web of fuzzy tendrils and ribbons in varying shades of orange and brown rises from the bottom of the image towards the top-right like thin coils of smoke.
Technical details: The colour image was created from NISP observations in the Y-, J- and H-bands, rendered blue, green and red, respectively. The size of the image is 11 232 x 12 576 pixels. The jagged boundary is due to the gaps in the array of NISP’s sixteen detectors, and the way the observations were taken with small spatial offsets and rotations to create the whole image. This is a common effect in astronomical wide-field images.
Accompanying Press Release
The above view of interstellar gas and dust was captured by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. The nebula is part of a so-called dark cloud, named LDN 1641. It sits at about 1300 light-years from Earth, within a sprawling complex of dusty gas clouds where stars are being formed, in the constellation of Orion.
This is because dust grains block visible light from stars behind them very efficiently but are much less effective at dimming near-infrared light.
The nebula is teeming with very young stars. Some of the objects embedded in the dusty surroundings spew out material – a sign of stars being formed. The outflows appear as magenta-coloured spots and coils when zooming into the image.
In the upper left, obstruction by dust diminishes and the view opens toward the more distant Universe with many galaxies lurking beyond the stars of our own galaxy.
Euclid observed this region of the sky in September 2023 to fine-tune its pointing ability. For the guiding tests, the operations team required a field of view where only a few stars would be detectable in visible light; this portion of LDN 1641 proved to be the most suitable area of the sky accessible to Euclid at the time.
The tests were successful and helped ensure that Euclid could point reliably and very precisely in the desired direction. This ability is key to delivering extremely sharp astronomical images of large patches of sky, at a fast pace. The data for this image, which is about 0.64 square degrees in size – or more than three times the area of the full Moon on the sky – were collected in just under five hours of observations.
Euclid is surveying the sky to create the most extensive 3D map of the extragalactic Universe ever made. Its main objective is to enable scientists to pin down the mysterious nature of dark matter and dark energy.
In visible light this region of the sky appears mostly dark, with few stars dotting what seems to be a primarily empty background. But, by imaging the cloud with the infrared eyes of its NISP instrument, Euclid reveals a multitude of stars shining through a tapestry of dust and gas.
This remarkable object is made of bronze, is around 30 cm diameter and weighs about 2.2 kg. It has a blue-green patina and is inlaid with gold symbols, usually interpreted as the full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars, including a cluster of seven stars, thought to represent the Pleiades. The gold arc on the right probably represents the Sun’s path between the solstices; the angle subtended by the arc (82°) is the correct angle sunrise at the summer and winter solstices and at the latitude of the discovery site (Mittelberg, near Nebra, in Germany); there was probably another such arc on the other side of the disk (now lost). Remarkably, the tin used in making the bronze from which it is formed has been traced by metallurgical analysis to Cornwall.
The Nebra disc has been dated to c. 1800–1600 BCE (Bronze Age) which makes it the oldest (certain) depiction of celestial phenomena known from anywhere in the world. In November 2021, a replica of the Nebra Sky Disc was taken by German astronaut Matthias Maurer to the International Space Station.
Posted in Art, Maynooth on September 9, 2025 by telescoper
One of the consequences of living in a (relatively) small Irish town surrounded by farmland is that every now and again you notice authentic countryside smells. This time of year is often accompanied by the whiff created by the slurry being spread on nearby fields. The farmers typically do this in mid to late September, depending on the weather; it is actually not allowed after 30th September). When I first noticed this sort of pong I thought there was something wrong with the drains, but you get used to it.
Anyway, this made me think of this painting
by Jean-François Millet (1851, oil on canvas, 37.3 cm x 55.2 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)
Of course the manure isn’t spread by hand nowadays. It’s done like this:
My attention was drawn today to this scuplture which is currently on display in the Department of Physics at Maynooth University. The artist and subject are unknown (to me) and the work is not dated, but the material is clearly Blu Tack, a putty-like pressure-sensitive adhesive commonly used to attach lightweight objects to walls, doors or other dry surfaces.
A young (male) person of my acquaintance sent me this picture a while ago. I think he found it here. I assume he thinks the old guy with the walking stick is me, and the boy is him. We’ll gloss over what he was trying to say by sending it to me but, whatever the reason, I found it intriguing.
The online description reads
Elderly man supported by boy, fresco of the Tomb of the Jugglers, Necropolis of Tarquinia (Unesco World Heritage List, 2004), Lazio, Italy, Etruscan civilization, 6th century BC.
This is from the Etruscan (i.e. pre-Roman) period and the best guess for the date is around 530 BC, so the first thing of interest is that, although it is damaged, it has survived pretty well. Fresco (paint on wet plaster, left to dry) is a very fragile medium and many made 1,000 years after this have not lasted as well. The reason for this is that the tomb was not unearthed until 1961, so it was undisturbed for about 2,500 years. The piece above is a section from a larger work that depicts a sort of funerary ritual.
Now to the description quoted above. For a start, the man is not all that “elderly” as his beard is not grey. He is however clearly older than the boy, who isn’t wearing a beard (nor anything else for that matter). The description says “supported by a boy” but if you look at the painting the older man is holding the younger man firmly by the wrist. That doesn’t look like “support” to me!
When I first saw this piece I assumed the older man was holding a staff or walking stick of some sort, but if you look at his right hand you’ll see his index finger extended as if he is pointing and the object in question is behind his hand. The stick also appears to be decorated, but I think it might be the trunk of a small tree; there are fig trees with fruit than hangs on the trunk, for example. It could be that the damaged area at the top of the stick represented foliage at the top. There are several depictions of trees elsewhere in the tomb.
Iinitially I thought the shapes under the original excerpt were meant to be waves, but it seems they are just part of an abstract frieze that runs all the way around.
So what can we infer from these clues? One interpretation is that the man with the beard is taking the boy away reluctantly for some nefarious activity? Sexual relationships between boys and older men were not uncommon in Greek civilisation so maybe that was also the case for the Etruscans?
But there is another interpretation, which I find more plausible given the context of the painting. The scenes in the centre and right represent the funeral rites, including music, but the man and boy (on the left) are clearly walking away from all that. Moreover, the figure in the central panel apparently standing in some sort of vessel looks very much like the boy in the panel above. Is the lid off to let him out, or is he about to be sealed in?
My reading of it, therefore, is that the boy is dead, and the man with the beard is no less than Charun, the demon charged with guiding the departed to the underworld. The name Charun is derived from the Greek Charon, but the character of Charun is quite different from the ferryman Charon. Anyway, he definitely looks like he’s taking the boy somewhere he doesn’t want to go, and Charun is often depicted wearing a skull cap as he is in the picture.
Now I definitely need to find out why my young friend sent me this…
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In the Dark 