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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!)