To the stars with a song! How generative AI helped an amateur astronomer

Source of inspiration

It is no secret that from time to time all authors experience a creative crisis. How can you write soulfully if one day is like another and nothing inspiring happens? One way to overcome the crisis is to completely change the environment in search of fresh ideas and emotions. For geeks like me, astronomical observations are perfect for this!

I used to go to the Planetarium and the People's Observatory in Gorky Park. A few years ago, I bought a telescope, and then a bunch of accessories for it. Since then, on clear nights, I set off with a tripod, mount, and a backpack of optics, as if on a secret mission.

You have to go far away because looking at the night sky from the city is almost useless due to strong light pollution. Choosing an observation site is helped by the light pollution map, as well as the elevation map. You can plan observations of periodic astronomical events according to the forecasts of the Moscow Planetarium. It is convenient to track interesting cosmic phenomena happening right now on the AstroAlert channel. You can easily simulate all observations in the free program Stellarium. It even has a "Solar System Editor" - a truly divine tool! I use it when I need to add data on newly discovered comets.

By the way, here is one of my photos of comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE).

Three years later, I photographed another comet — C/2023 A3 (Zijinshan-ATLAS). Find ten differences!

Photographing the Moon and planets is much easier because they are available for observation all year round. You can pre-select optimal conditions and repeat shooting from different locations.

In severe frost, visibility is best, and the camera sensor makes less noise, but it is terribly cold for the photographer. You cool down along with the telescope while waiting for the temperature of all its elements and the connected camera to equalize. But on one of those nights, I experienced pure childlike joy. Maybe even something close to the total perspective vortex described by the science fiction writer Douglas Adams. I didn't expect to be so moved.

Looking is not the same as seeing

Imagine that you are standing in a deserted wilderness in the middle of the night, gazing at the starry sky. At first, nothing unusual happens. Arriving at the location shortly after sunset, you can catch a glimpse of Venus and easily find other bright points that are not stars at all: Jupiter, Saturn, and a little later — Mars.

For planetary shooting, it is more convenient to shoot a video and break it down into individual frames. Then you need to select the best ones, center, crop, and create a new animation from them. That's what I did using the PIPP program. At the time of shooting, Saturn was almost 9 times farther from Earth than the Sun.

Much depends on the location, time, and weather conditions. In winter, from my locations, Capella and Aldebaran are visible earlier than other stars. These celestial beacons are not as bright as Sirius, but they rise above the horizon first. Below Capella are the sources of the Northern Taurids and Geminids meteor showers, and closer to the horizon are the December Monocerotids.

It is worth returning to them around one o'clock in the morning, when they generously scatter "falling stars" (up to 250 per hour!), and for now, Deneb, Vega, and Altair become visible in the west. With each passing minute, the sky darkens, your eyes adjust, and you see less bright stars, recognize familiar constellations and asterisms.

The next shot was taken in overview mode. Can you find the "Big Dipper" in it? It's easier to see if you squint your eyes slightly and move away from the monitor.

Looking at the stars in real life, at some point you catch a wide and slightly lighter diagonal stripe in the sky with your peripheral vision – the Milky Way. Then consider that your eyes have already adjusted enough to start observing with a fast lens binoculars. Near Aldebaran, you can see the Hyades star cluster, and above and slightly to the right – the Pleiades. In the southwest, high in the sky, you can see the Andromeda Nebula, towards which our galaxy is flying. With a good choice of location and good weather, you can see several more deep space objects from the Messier catalog.

If you don't look at the Moon and let yourself immerse in the darkness, then after another 5-10 minutes, the second phase of dark adaptation will be completed. Then a miracle will happen: an abyss with a thousand lights will appear before your eyes.

When the soul sings

At this moment, all thoughts about everyday hustle and bustle disappear somewhere. There are no more work tasks and calendar plans, household problems and worries about loved ones. The mind is completely freed from the background processing of news. All the informational noise dissolves in the night sky, the view of which is truly mesmerizing. There is a desire to endlessly explore all this magnificence and examine it more closely. You want to dream of space expansion and... sing!

The situation itself pushed me to write a song: deciding to move the telescope, I felt very cold – my fingers wouldn't bend. So the metaphor "cosmic cold" was born, and the winter jacket was perceived as a spacesuit. Therefore, the first lines were born by themselves:

Cosmic cold, and I feel like I'm in a spacesuit

Walking in a jacket, with the hood pulled up.

From the outside, the situation might have seemed comical: an adult person came to the wilderness and is freezing in the middle of the night just because they wanted to look at the stars. The following lines became a logical continuation of the song:

Driven by hunger and thirst for knowledge.

In these pursuits, I can be ridiculous.

I looked at the sky again and thought that there is no point in justifying my hobbies. Either you think and feel similarly, or you find another hobby. In the song, it sounded with youthful maximalism:

But to hell with the opinion of the crowd!

I don't care about it!

Then I needed to come up with a chorus. Using AMS is easier and more effective, but manned missions are more inspiring:

We will reach the stars, seriously aiming.

Our artificial light will touch exoplanets!

I wrote a couple more verses at home, sorting and processing the photos. I managed to capture Jupiter with its four largest moons, Saturn with its characteristic ring, as well as interesting details of the lunar relief, highlighted by the boundary of light and shadow. All this also inspired me, but after writing the text, I put it aside for a long time, as I did not know how to voice it.

AI instead of musicians

The opportunity came unexpectedly: I was looking for materials for the #neurodictionary section at work and found a mention of an unusual generative AI. It was Suno AI, capable of generating music based on text descriptions. I experimented with an early version that didn't do much and was full of limitations. So I uploaded quatrains one or two at a time, tried to stitch together fragments with similar sounds into a single composition, tried different genres, but the result was unsatisfactory.

Gradually, I mastered the features of requests to Suno AI. For example, sometimes the vocals were generated with incorrect stress on individual words. To get around this, I highlighted the stressed vowel as a capital letter within the word. Breaking the text with markers helped make the song more cohesive. I highlighted the verses with the word [Verse] in square brackets and marked the chorus [Chorus] — this made the transitions smoother. When I wanted to add an instrumental break, I wrote [Interlude], and for a clearer ending, I indicated [Final chords].

Finally, after many repetitions, I heard something close to the originally conceived version. I wanted to achieve an uplifting and fairly melodic performance, without unnecessary epicness and brutality.

Here is the final request (prompt) that I used to generate the song: pop rock 1987 dramatic optimistic melodic male romantic voice

[Verse]

Cosmic cold, and I feel like I'm in a spacesuit

Walking in a jacket, pulling up the hood.

Driven by hunger and thirst for knowledge.

In these pursuits, I can be ridiculous.

[Chorus]

But to hell with the opinion of the crowd!

I don't care about it!

We will reach the stars, seriously aiming.

Our artificial light will touch exoplanets!

[Verse]

Cast aside doubts!

Calculations don't lie!

We've stayed on Earth too long!

The stars are calling us!

[Interlude]

[Verse]

We will embark on a journey for bold ideas!

And we will leave Earth not out of boredom!

We are guided by faith in the human mind.

We are driven by love... Love for science!

[Final chords]

You can listen to the song here.

Of course, the result is far from perfect. The intro is unclear, the chorus is not repeated, there are noticeable cuts and autotune in places. The musical part is similar to 90% of pop music, but through trial and error, an interesting result was still achieved.

In conclusion

To this song, I have gone on night outings with a telescope more than once, and the Suno AI service has been seriously improved over the year. It now has the ability to continue a liked fragment in the same style and automatically create illustrations as album covers. So, dare and create together with AI!

My song was originally intended to be split into two voices. I even came up with a video for it, for which I have a detailed storyboard in mind. There are already generative services that make animations based on a picture. Perhaps soon there will be more powerful solutions that take into account both text and music when generating clips.