It’s January already, which means it’s tax season! This year I decided to make an infographic celebrating NASA, one of my favorite tax-funded programs in America.

I wanted to show what Earth’s control panel might look like if it was a spaceship piloted by humans. It’s a bit too busy with all the flashing lights, but I was going for a mix between sci-fi and pinball so I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out. All of the data should be scientifically accurate, even if it’s moving too fast to read properly.

This might be the only infographic I post for a while - I’m working on a pretty extensive non-science art project right now, and it’s been taking up a lot of my time. I was also invited to be on the panel of judges for the Malofiej Infographics Summit in Spain, so I’m going to be out of town for few weeks. But I haven’t forgotten about this blog, and I’ll be back soon with more science!

• Acknowledgements

• A lot of data went into this infographic. Here's where I got all the information:
• Hubble/ESA moon rotation video, NASA Visible Earth world rotation video, John Walker Astronomical distance calculator, Weather Underground historical Seattle weather, National Geographic star map, John Walker star location viewer, NASA Earth facts, NASA moon facts, NASA sun facts, US Census Bureau population estimate, European Synchroton Radiation Facility earth core estimate, USC Satellite Database, Voyager photo of Earth.

It’s been a while since I made a science infographic! But hopefully this month’s post is full of enough biology to make up for the wait. I’ve actually wanted to do an embryogenesis GIF for months, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work. Then I stumbled across this awesome GIF on Reddit and got the idea to use a spiraling animation style. (Incidentally, if anyone knows who made that GIF I’d love to know).

I’m actually really happy with how this turned out. I made this using 44 animations that are 9 frames each. That’s 396 sketches total - probably the most complicated GIF I’ve made so far. I am a little sad that I wasn’t able to show size properly though. For example. the 24 week fetus is about 40 times heavier than a 12 week fetus (but you can’t tell that from this drawing). This is my last post for 2014, so happy holidays everyone! Thank you so much for reading Tabletop Whale and supporting my art.

• Sources

• Gilbert, Scott. Developmental Biology, 9th Edition. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 2010.

I’ve been really busy this month working with some awesome science writers! Because of that I haven’t had much time for GIFs, but I did manage to fit in a non-moving infographic for this month’s post.

This month I also replaced my 5-year old Mac with a custom PC, so I decided to make something with a computer theme. There’s already tons of tutorials on the internet about building computers, so this poster’s more of an illustrated list than an actual set of instructions.

It was really fun putting the computer together, and my new PC is awesome. I have dual monitors now, and I can finally run all of my design programs at the same time. But it was harder than I thought to set up a computer - kind of like Ikea furniture on extra hard mode (it didn’t help that I forgot the motherboard spacers the first time around).

Anyway, thanks for putting up with the slow updates to this blog. This month has been really hectic and I’m looking forward to having the time to animate again. I do have something already in the works, so stay tuned for a science packed GIF for my next post.