Write Your Name In Galaxies!

[/caption]

Ever wanted to see your name in lights? How about star lights? Well there’s a fun little website that will let you assemble your name — or anything you want to say — using real galaxies as the letters… very cool!

Created by UK astronomer Steven Bamford, My Galaxies uses actual images of galaxies acquired through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Galaxy Zoo projects to create your message, which you can then share on Facebook, Twitter or email. You can even download a high-res version of the resulting PNG image (although I did find that I had to open the file in Photoshop and add a layer filled with black behind the galaxified letters, in order to clear out some background noise. Perhaps this can be fixed in the future.)

It’s a nice bit of coding, and makes for a cool banner or message for your favorite starry-eyed individual. Check it out!

“Really? There are galaxies that look like letters? OK, S and Z I can believe, but M? H? R? Capitals or little letters? What about punctuation, or numbers? Well, there aren’t many, but when you’ve got pictures of millions of galaxies and an energetic group of Zooites there isn’t much that can stay hidden!”

– Steven Bamford

Make your own My Galaxy message and read more about how it’s done here.

(Tip of the star-studded hat to Jennifer Oullette for the heads-up!)

14 Replies to “Write Your Name In Galaxies!”

  1. Nice, but needs some C&P to do ümlauts.

    Next challenge: Cyrillic. Or Chinese…

  2. Nice, what a creative work there was, at first time, though the galaxies were made by software or some kind of that way, not the real one,,,

    thanks for this beautifull information,,,

  3. This was featured in an article linked to a couple of Carnival of Spaces ago. I first read about it there, and left a comment linking to an image that I generated, and also pointing out that it would be better if you could selectively re-generate letters you’re not happy with instead of the “try a new combination of galaxies” option being an all-or-nothing affair.

    The message I generated featured a line from the song “After Rain” by Oysterband that goes: “And all my life I’ll read the sky”. I can’t think of a more appropriate one, can you? (In context it’s about clouds rather than galaxies, but hey.)

    There have been changes to the site since then, in that you now get information about all the galaxies in your message. That’s an update since the last time I looked.

  4. Nice! I saw something like this a few years ago, when someone used galaxies to write God’s Final Message To His Creation, as seen in “So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish”.

Comments are closed.