Pop Culture Pulsar: The Science Behind Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover
In an earlier post, I described my quest to uncover the story behind the story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. The stacked plot featured on the record was originally created by radio astronomer Harold D. Craft, Jr. in the course of working on his PhD dissertation, “Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars” (September, 1970).
When folks refer to the data visualization, they generally just say that it shows a series of radio frequency periods from the first pulsar discovered. But what does that mean? What is a pulsar, how do you read the stacked plot, and how was the data collected?
Image Credits: Photograph by Jen Christiansen, featuring Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover designed by Peter Saville, and Figure 5.37 in “Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars,” by Harold D. Craft, Jr. (Cornell University, September 1970)
