Astronomy - Ultima Thule - English Roundhand

"In the first few hours New Year's Day 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft, the same craft that snapped gorgeous photos of Pluto 3 1/2 years earlier, flew past the most distant object yet visited in our solar system, Ultima Thule. Ultima Thule is a trans-Neptunian or Kuiper Belt Object (a minor planet beyond Neptune) contact binary (2 objects that touch and orbiting a common center of gravity). Ultima is the larger of the two bodies with a diameter of 12 miles (19 km), Thule the smaller, with a diameter of about 9 mile (14 km). Its rotational period (an Ultima Thule day) is about 15 hours. It take 8 minutes for light from our Sun to reach Earth; it takes 6 hours to reach Ultima Thule.

As in all the rest of my astronomical series, the calligraphy is in a traditional English Roundhand. I wanted to keep the letterforms and flourishing basic. Having no descenders in the word-set the T is the natural candidate to sprout the flourish. The flourish, extended yet simple creates an optical counterbalance to the planetoid, and a graphic "nest" for the words to rest upon. Being composed of 2 separate lines combined to form a single unit implies the nature of the planetary object itself without being literal."

~2019, Don Marsh~
©2019 Don Marsh