I had a spare weekend to get together with the Gimp and this is the first offspring of that union (there’s a kind of pun here, but you probably need to have lived in the UK to understand it – the poms have a much different idea of what the word ‘gimp’ means than the yanks, in much the same way that ‘rubber’ means two different things to the two cultures).

 

To build the image I started with a picture of my favorite teacup full of black tea, taken under plain incandescent bulbs in my kitchen (this might not have been the best light but I was impatient – daylight would have made the exposure time shorter, and would have resulted in a better, more sharply focused image).

 

After downloading the image to my PC I went hunting for a galaxy to paste in – browsing through the Hubble space telescope’s fantastic, copyright free image gallery

 

Having found a likely candidate, I opened the Gimp where I resized the large image, and adjusted its perspective to look like a swirl in the teacup.

 

Then it was a matter of adding the teacup image as a new layer, selecting the tea, and making a gradient mask on it which would progressively reveal the galaxy in the layer beneath. 

 

A little smudging of the two mixed down layers and voila… a galaxy in a teacup.

 

I was impressed with the Gimp, and inordinately pleased with the results. For my next project I plan on making a storm in a teacup.

 

(tags: teacup galaxy tea stars cup saucer teaspoon stargazing gimp photo)