#cp1919

Soooooo this happened today, and in addition to throttling our Twitter mentions, we’ve been alerted to some fantastic threads we somehow overlooked, including this amazing rug from Jaime Odabachian’s eponymous family business. Odabashian was founded in 1921 by Jaime’s Armenian grandfather, and the company’s mission is to weave stories through design, literally.

As Jaime explained in his email to us: 

The rug was produced in a hand-tufted technique and is a tribute to the work of the discovery of the first Pulsar by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish in 1967 and the subsequent use by Peter Saville of the image to design the iconic “Unknown Pleasures” album cover by Joy Division. 

We exhibited the rug at Zona Maco Art fair in 2017 and they are available on a made-to-order basis. 

Pulsars are the surviving remnants of supernova explosions, rapidly spinning neutron stars emitting a beamed column of light (like a lighthouse) along one axis while rotating around another axis. The rug features 80 successive periods of the first pulsar observed, CP1919, stacked on top of one another. The original image was produced at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. 

If you aren’t already familiar with the image, this article via Scientific American goes deep into the origin of the design. And this short YouTube video explains how the pulsar data came to be transformed into the classic Joy Division album cover which took on a life of its own (including this DIY version!). Lastly, Summer wrote about both pulsars and Dame Jocelyn Bell for Syfy Wire last year. 

You can follow Odabashian on Instagram and Facebook, and be sure to check out our other pulsar themed posts here. 

The cover art for Joy Division's 1979 album "Unknown Pleasures" was originally published as a black-on-white science plot by Harold Craft in his 1970 PhD thesis"Radio observations of the pulse profiles and dispersion measures of twelve pulsars". Page 215 shows 80 successive pulses of the first pulsar observed, CP1919, tastefully stacked on top of one another. The plot was subsequently reproduced as a white-on-red image for the cover art of the 1970 International Astronomy Union General Assembly "Highlights of Astronomy" edited by Cornelis De Jager, as the green-on-white image in Ostriker's article mentioned above, as a white-on-black image in Walter Herdeg's 1974 "Graphis Diagrams: The Graphic Visualization of Abstract Data", and then in the black-on-white style in Simon Mitton's editing of the 1977 edition of "The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy".