A frequent contributing artist for Astronomy, Lynette Cook has recently completed a project about the historical 1843 outburst of Eta Carinae for the Gemini Observatory. In a sequence of seven images, her conception of the expanding blast wave from Eta Carinae’s 1843 eruption reflects new research on the hypergiant star, led by Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley. His observations suggest the cause of the 1843 outburst was an explosion, not a steady wind.

You may remember Cook from her work on the June 2008 cover of Astronomy, where she created an image of our night sky in the years before the Milky Way’s future merger with the Andromeda Galaxy, or from the article  “250 million years ago, did an asteroid nearly end life on Earth?” in the April 2008 issue.

And be sure to check out Cook’s art for “Are super-sized Earths the new frontier?” on the cover of the November 2008 issue.