About CosmicNeighbors.net

Welcome to my gallery of astrophotographs.  This is less of a general 'about' page than an answer to the question "How did you decide on that domain name?"

As you can readily see from my math and logology website, another one of my serious interests is the art of constrained writing as popularized by the French group Oulipo since the 1960's.  Constrained writing involves the creation of ordinary-looking prose or poetry within the confines of some self-imposed rule, often based on the alphabet.  For example the letter E might be prohibited, or the length of each word in the text might be pre-determined (as in my book Not A Wake, the only book ever written entirely in Pilish).  So when it came time to choose a domain name I thought it would be interesting to constrain it in some way that is related to astronomy or, even better, astrophotography.

The two common frameworks underlying astrophotographs are RGB (in which a color image is produced by exposing through Red, Green, and Blue filters, perhaps combined with additional exposures through a Luminance filter) and SHO (in which exposures through three narrowband filters, Sulfur-II, Hydrogen-α, and Oxygen-III are assigned to the colors R,G,B to produce a "false color" image).  Might there be something interesting involving the letters RGB and SHO?

A quick search led to the discovery that "neighbors" is the only English word containing all six letters R,G,B,S,H,O in a contiguous chunk.  Even better, this chunk occurs at the very end of the word.  But wait, there's more!  If we write our domain name in a line and then wrap the last six letters around a circle the result is this:

Both RGB and SHO appear in the correct order when traversing the circle clockwise, and if we color the letters according to their contributions to an image the two reds, two greens, and two blues are adjacent to each other.  What more could a dedicated Oulipist ask for?