First of all, I’d like to give a shoutout to the various creators of the “undo” concept in personal computing — I learned from the Wikipedia article about the history of the “undo” concept that there are multiple inventors of this very important tool. Without it, this week’s blog efforts would have resulted in many many tears. I have created a stunning new banner for this blog! I will share my journey and what I’ve learned along the way.

Images — copyright and copywrong

It is so very easy to find really amazing images on the internet. It is just as easy to copy them and re-use them. But should you re-use just any image? No, gentle reader, you should not. Many are under copyright and it would be illegal to use them as well as just not nice.

But dismay not, there are many sources of images that you can use. I’m going to share with you my ultimate favorite — the NASA Image Library. Images created by NASA are free to use for many purposes. There is often a suggested attribution phrase. In this case it is imply “Credit: NASA.”

See Media Usage Guidelines to learn more about using NASA images.

Your taxpayer dollars have paid untold millions to create spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. You can personally reap the benefits of space research by using the incredible images that inspire us whenever we see them  — even printed on a Tshirt at Target.

The Hubble Deep Field is an image I have chosen to use for the background of this blog’s banner. It tells an amazing story. Bob Williams, once director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, decided to point the Hubble at a tiny dark part of the sky where no astronomical objects had ever been observed. What did he find? More than 10,000 galaxies! Read more about The Hubble Deep Fields on hubblesite.org

Credit where credit is due

After you have identified images that you may use, either freely or with permission, it is a good idea to acknowledge the person or machine that created the image. A lot of hard work went into it, after all. Creative Commons Licenses will tell you exactly how the author would like to be acknowledged. A simple cut and paste of the text into your digital creation is easy and will surely give you some good karma.

Learn more about attributions in About the Licenses from the Creative Commons organization.

Use your own photos!

Our fearless leader has made a suggestion that I never thought I would follow — use a photo you have taken yourself! I decided to use a personal photo which is sadly getting older by the minute but is still one of my favorite photos of myself. It’s me at the  IFLA conference in 2010. I was lucky enough to present a paper there:  Measuring the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope.

So you have some images — now what?

There are some good “freemium” internet tools for amateur image wranglers such as myself. I chose PixlrX. I recommend it highly especially because it has a very forgiving “undo button.” I have used Canva in the past and appreciate its ease of use and ability to make a quick flyer or poster. I thought Pixlr was easier to use to combine images and photographs and resize stuff. I made a lot lot lot of ugly and bizarre banners before settling on the one that’s up there now.

What did I do with PixlrX?

• Cropped the Hubble Deep Field image so that it fits in the banner space on this blog
• Decreased the “color” and “light” filters to subdue the background image just enough that writing will show up on it
• Chose from an array of attention-getting fonts that would actually show up on the dark image. I chose “Neon”
• Inserted the image of yours-truly
• Tried a bajillion frames but didn’t use one because none of them looked good
• Added the little flowers to the podium in my photo instead

Techie help requested

Gentle reader, I added a caption to my image but I just don’t see it. Do you? Have you been able to add a caption to your blog banner image? Were you successful? It should say “Credit NASA”. TIA for any suggestions.