Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime by Elizabeth A. Kessler (review)

With their saturated colors and hyper-realistic detail, along with their promise of revealing the unseen universe, the images from the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, have a unique place in our visual culture. They are at once unprecedented—looking out into distant space and back into cosmic time—and commonplace—featured in calendars, screen savers, and posters. Rarely is their existence as visual objects probed: how did they come to be, why do they look the way they do? In this illuminating study art historian Elizabeth Kessler investigates them from a variety of perspectives, focusing not on the cosmic objects in the images, but rather on the images themselves as representations—and as such part of a history that includes astronomical illustrations, landscape paintings, and fine-art photographs.

Finding a special affinity between the Hubble images and pictures of the American West produced in the context of 19th-century geological survey expeditions, she notes the similarity between the cosmic formations in high-profile Hubble images and the buttes and cloud banks in Romantic landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and others. Common to both kinds of images is a sense of atmospheric drama suggesting the sublime—the aesthetic category associated with awesome and overwhelming natural phenomena. The resemblance of the Hubble images to Western landscape pictures, both paintings and photographs, goes beyond appearances to a common American ideology of exploration. Both types of images also serve to offer a visual record of exploration to a broad public whose support the very undertaking requires, effectively becoming a public relations tool (the Hubble Heritage Project, highlighted throughout the book, is effectively a publicity arm of the space telescope program, charged with making evocative images for public release).

In their appearance, the Hubble images draw specific inspiration from the mid-20th-century photography of Ansel Adams, who synthesized the informative 19th-century geological survey photography of William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and Clarence Watkins, and the more fictionalized and dramatized work of the Western landscape painters. Adams produced highly detailed yet atmospherically expressive images that convey the spirituality of the uninhabited wilderness in theatrical fashion; immensely popular, his photographs have found a ready market in mass reproduction (much as, Kessler notes, the Hubble images have).

Conducting numerous interviews and doing extensive archival research, Kessler analyzes in depth both the production and the reception of the Hubble images. She reveals the myriad technical procedures used and choices made by the “image specialists” who take the telescope data (much of it based on light invisible to the human eye) and transform it into pictures. Decisions abound, concerning rotation, cropping, format, contrast, and color (including deciding which colors will correspond to which subsets of data); meanwhile, multiple raw images (both different angles of view and different spectra) are combined and cleaned up using manipulation software such as Photoshop, in the end synthesized into seamless wholes. “Artifacts” of the instrument—uneven exposures, glare and streaks, cosmic rays, seams between raw images, irregular frames—are eliminated (the one exception being the characteristic diffraction spikes from bright stars, an effect of the telescope that is not only retained in the images but is sometimes added). With evidence of the instrument eliminated, and done so by means of multi-layered image-processing techniques that are themselves undetectable, the Hubble images impart the illusion that we are looking at the phenomena themselves, unmediated. But, as Kessler shows, just the opposite is true.

Although wildly popular with the public, the images have had an ambivalent reception in both the scientific community, where they have little usefulness for study, and the press, where some critics have found their artifice, including their “false color” (as it is unhappily phrased), suspect. (Because they represent invisible wavelengths of light, their color is invariably arbitrary or...