The photos from space are more than just representations of scientific data. They are more than pictures that explain the vast universe beyond our planet. The photos are comparable to western paintings, according to Elizabeth Kessler, a Stanford University lecturer. The Hubble space photos transcend their scientific purpose. The Hubble Telescope photos, just like landscape paintings from Thomas Moran, evoke a powerful aesthetic response, as Atlas Obscura details:
“[Hubble’s] views of ethereal nebulae and glittering galaxies and star fields—they’re not just compelling visualizations of scientific data,” Kessler said during a recent online lecture for the American Institute of Physics. “Like the 19th-century paintings, they evoke a powerful aesthetic response. They encourage us to see the universe as sublime.”
The Hubble Heritage Project, formed in 1998 by a small group of astronomers and image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute, regularly invoked landscape tropes when releasing new images and descriptions of celestial phenomena. For the “Pillars of Creation,” for instance—an astonishing image showing those massive plumes of gas in a region of the Eagle Nebula—the star-formation process was compared to the forces that shape the buttes of the American Southwest, notes Kessler.
The aim of the project, like those 19th-century Western landscape painters, was to create aesthetically rich images of exploratory observations. Today, astronomers and astrophotographers work closely together on the cosmic images that have revolutionized the way we perceive the universe.
image via Atlas Obscura