This path was created by Amanda Koziura. The last update was by Daniela Solomon.

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Art of STEM home

2020 CWRU Winners

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First Place, CWRU Category. Taken outside in ambient lighting and digitally untouched, this picture shows one of the amazing properties of light: refraction. The semi-transparent layer of skin on the outside of the hand is just the right thickness to split the white light into its colored components. Small fragments of the hand are all acting like a prism giving the effect of holding tiny rainbows right in the palm. The effect is seen best when slightly out of focus, but is easily seen by eye when looking at the right angle. This image is important to me as a reminder that nature has lots of amazing surprises hiding right under our noses, and that we never have to look too far to find a sense of awe.
Second place, CWRU category. Invisible to the naked eye, this photograph of the Rosette Nebula was captured from a backyard telescope on a cold winter's night. This stellar flower rests near the constellation of Orion and consists of young stars that heat and excite surrounding gas into emitting light resembling a rose. Revealing something so faint and distant requires layering images captured over the course of several hours. Photographing any nebula is a very delicate and involved process that requires a blend of art and science. Light pollution, equipment limitations, and digital noise all challenge the quality of deep-sky images. This picture reveals one of the many hidden beauties of our universe and instills a sense of wonder.
Third Place, CWRU category. Output view of software tracking body parts of a tethered, flying fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) from a high-speed video filmed at one hundred frames per second. The fly beats its wings approximately two hundred twenty times per second, and so even at this high frame rate, they appear as blurs. As the front edge of the blur corresponds to the farthest forward point in the wingstroke during that frame, we obtain an estimate of the power of the wingstroke by measuring this edge. By taking the difference in the edges of the two wingstroke blurs, we obtain an estimate of the direction in which the fly is steering.