Trappist-1e Home Lithography

grid of nine monographs of planets in neon colors

I was really excited when Phil contacted me in early September and asked me to choose the next Kick-About theme. I bandied about a few ideas in my head before finally settling on the Trappist-1e exoplanet that was discovered just a couple of years ago. I remember when they announced the discovery of the planets that are orbiting the Trappist 1 star: a group of friends and I had a whole conversation about them while on a long training run. The planets Trappist-1e, -1f, and -1g fall in the habitable zone of the Trappist 1 star and they all have very short “years.” Trappist-1e has a year that is only 6.099 Earth days long. If humans were ever to settle on another planet with such a drastically different orbit, would we change the way we measure time? Years? Would it change the way we consider aging?

The prompt:

Artist rendering from wikipedia of the Trappist 1e exoplanet
Text box describing the discovery of the Trappist-1e exoplanet

For this Kick-About, I returned to making monoprints in the same vein as I did for the Alice Neel prompt from the Kick-About #5. I wanted something spontaneous and bursting with energy. I sat down and calculated how many Trappist-1e years I would be now and it was humbling to say the least: I am 2,307 Trappist-1e years old. The other two numbers represent my Earth ages: 38 years old, having spent 14,072 days orbiting our star. We don’t actually know what Trappist-1e looks like (the picture in the prompt is an artist’s rendering), so I let my imagination run wild making planets on the inking plate.

A few closeups of my favorites from the grid:

There were some monographs that didn’t make it into the grid – one is below – I plan to post the other “outtakes” on Instagram in the next few days. I am very excited to see what everyone came up with for the Kick-About #11, which will be up tomorrow!

monograph of black abstract planet with green edges

9 comments

    1. Thank you, Jilanne! I just put up some more out-takes on IG. Monoprinting is a very fitting technique for this year, for sure. I have found it is certainly hard to plan anything too involved these days!

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  3. ♡! So much about astronomy relies on ways of seeing that don’t correspond to what the majority of human eyes perceive, so as far as an “artist’s rendering” goes, who’s to say what is realistic? Looking forward to seeing what others come up with too. Also, that somewhere in the world a training run becomes an extended conversation about exoplanets gives me hope. ^_^

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    1. Thank you, Sunshine! Those were good training runs, for sure – 10 or 12 miles gives the imagination lots of room to roam 🙂
      The Trappist planets were detected by transit, so someone(s) basically observed it blocking light from its star – we are completely free to create Trappist-1e in any way we can imagine!

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