Making the Artifact

I started with the following images:
A picture of Brian Curless’ dragon.	The Crab Nebula as seen by the Hubble space telescope.	A recent picture of the Space Needle.
I then applied one of the filters in Photoshop to the dragon to give it a reddish glow. The dragon was used as the background layer for the final image. I cropped the image of the crab nebula to get rid of the text and the frame and to give it the same dimensions as the picture of the dragon. I then added the crab nebula as a partially transparent layer on top of the dragon. The third and final layer of the artifact is the picture of the Space Needle. I used my implementation of Intelligent Scissors to obtain a mask (which is actually a composition of 13 different masks):
The contour of the outer edge of the Space Needle…	…gave this mask.	And after combining the original mask with the additional 12 masks needed to mask out the “holes” in the Space Needle construction, the final mask looks like this.
Finally the mask was applied to the third layer of the artifact. I also translated the third layer and applied a “glow” filter with “color burn” to it. The result is shown below:
The final artifact.