My son Giovanni is becoming obsesses with Astronomy. We’ve been reading a book on Astronomy together and watching a ton of episodes of The Universe and How the Universe Was Made (the latter being superior, IMHO). One of the episodes we loved is the one about supernovae. Last night, we sat down and did a few drawings and this is the one I did of a Type Ia Supernova. I used pastels (again) and then scanned it into my computer and applied a few filters to make it look nice. This was an awesome opportunity for a lens flare effect in Photoshop! Below is the final image. Note, the slight blue haze around the white dwarf was a specific request from my son.
This image represents one of the stages leading to the Supernova. Wikipedia explains it nicely in this diagram:
