sajidullah / VanGoghsStarryNight

An analysis of the power spectrum from van Gogh's The Starry Night

Van Gogh's Starry Night Power Spectrum Analysis

This is the code for the aXiv article: add hyperlink

Abstract:

Vincent van Gogh's painting, The Starry Night, is an iconic piece of art and cultural history. The painting portrays a night sky full of stars, with eddies (spirals) both large and small. \cite{Kolmogorov1941}'s description of subsonic, incompressible turbulence gives a model for turbulence that involves eddies interacting on many length scales, and so the question has been asked: is The Starry Night turbulent? To answer this question, we calculate the azimuthally averaged power spectrum of a square region ( pixels) of night sky in The Starry Night. We find a power spectrum, , where is the wavevector, that shares the same features as supersonic turbulence. It has a power-law in the scaling range, . We identify a driving scale, , dissipation scale, and a bottleneck. This leads us to believe that van Gogh's depiction of the starry night closely resembles the turbulence found in real molecular clouds, the birthplace of stars in the Universe.

Example Command Line Argument in iPython:

run PowerSpectrumVanGogh -file "StarryNightSky.png"

where -file is the argument for feeding in the Starry Night data.

Example data from Starry Night:

The .png file that I pass to my PowerSpectrumVanGogh code is: