Gallery: Making Art from Spitzer Science

Visually telling the story of buckyballs – 60-atom carbon molecules that Spitzer detected for the first time in space earlier this year – wasn't exactly easy. Hurt and Pyle had to represent both the very large and the very small in the same frame, leading to the unique perspective seen here. "I really like how the buckyball renders came out, especially how each one is lit from its own bonds between atoms (as opposed to all of them being lit from an external light source, the way molecules are often rendered)," Pyle says. "The final result just looks cool...like some strange bio-luminescent space organisms."