The pulsar image of Peter Saville’s iconic design for the first Joy Division album has been reproduced a lot in recent years. When Adam Capriola wanted to use the design for a parody t-shirt, he followed an internet trail that went beyond what he could have imagined. In a blog post about his findings, he discovers how the image ended up in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy (where drummer Stephen Morris first discovered it), some facts about the pulsar and a few interesting facts about the nature of copyright laws. Below, the image as it appeared in Scientific American in 1971.
Submit design and illustration work for consideration in Image of the Day to Ronson Slagle.