For three decades, astronomy photographs collected by space telescopes have amazed with their vivid, brilliant colors and exquisite detail. Now, the James Webb Telescope promises to broaden our view of the cosmos with renderings that evoke a sublime experience.
When in 1609 Galileo turned his three-foot-long, red-leather telescope to the heavens, he extended the senses of mankind. And in doing so he introduced a new experience of a different kind: a technologically mediated vision.
Since then, the instruments that scan the skies have become larger, more powerful. They have climbed to the top of the highest mountains and, like Hubble, Kepler, Chandra, Spitzer and now the James Webb Space Telescope, have stationed themselves beyond Earth’s atmosphere to dazzle us with their portraits of the universe.
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“However, the impressive images taken by these artifacts are not instantaneous. They are processed images”, art historian Elizabeth A. Kessler explains to SINC.
And it is that the specialist details that “astronomers and digital artists make conscious and deliberate decisions about what to show, what color palette and contrast levels to use to make them accessible and evoke feelings of wonder and greatness in the public”.
In her book Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, this researcher at Stanford University (USA) and an analyst of the visual culture of science points out that the images from telescopes have changed the perception of space. Cosmos: They have transformed what we thought was the vast blackness of space into a virtual garden of constellations and stars.
But Kessler reminds: “Astronomers do not create their images of nebulae, galaxies, black holes, and star fields in a vacuum of objectivity.”
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Source: SINC