Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime

4. From Unknown Frontiers to Familiar Places

175 FOUR FROM UNKNOWN FRONTIERS TO FAMILIAR PLACES The Landscape Astronomers hold complex attitudes toward images, and they have carefully crafted the images from the Hubble Space Telescope in a manner that satisfies their need for a scientifically valid representation of the data as well as their desire to evoke a particular aesthetic response. The resulting views of the cosmos engage both reason and the senses, and to grasp them fully we must allow the images to activate both faculties, thereby replaying the experience of the sublime. At this point I want to revisit the Romantic depiction of the American West and consider its symbolic value for the Hubble images. The landscapes came out of a particular moment in the history of the American West, one associated with scientific exploration, and they also carry with them a set of myths and ideals that contribute to definitions of American identity. The Hubble images, through their adoption of the visual tropes of the older views, interact with this history and repurpose aspects of it. The reference to the sublime shapes our very notions of the cosmos , and by evoking the American landscape and its associations with exploration and the frontier, the images bring the aesthetic experience to the ending that Kant proposed. Instead of a universe that leaves us only with a sense of our insignificance, it becomes a place that we experience as both overwhelming and within our grasp. The attention to the symbolic value of the landscape matters, because without it the visual comparison that I used to open this book might be just one among many possibilities. Given the large number of Hubble images, one could find exam- 176 FROM UNKNOWN FRONTIERS TO FAMILIAR PLACES ples that seem to owe a debt to other artists and periods. Michael Lynch and Samuel Edgerton, for example, began their study of digital image processing in astronomy because they saw a visual correspondence between early abstraction and astronomical images from the 1980s.1 They compare the colorful concentric rings of planetary nebulae to Wassily Kandinsky’s color studies, and the pixellated images of Halley’s comet flyby in 1986 remind them of Georges Seurat’s experiments with pointillism. Lynch and Edgerton argue that the machine aesthetic of modernism had so permeated our culture as to be a natural choice for astronomical images that depended on technology at every level—from data collection to display on a computer screen. However, several of the visual similarities they identify as linking astronomical images to modernist painting, namely, geometric blocks of colors and a flattening of the visual field, are not common to the Hubble images. As the authors themselves note, astronomers frequently intervened to eliminate some of these features. With the Hubble images, the increased resolution of digital detectors and greater sophistication in image processing has largely eliminated them. Given the opportunity, astronomers discarded the modernist aesthetic with its interest in pure form and color, geometry and machines, for an aesthetic of naturalism. On the other hand, modernism’s quest for purity might seem an attractive approach because it could free the Hubble images from the potentially confusing resemblance to the world we see around us. In addition, the critical and artistic conversation that accompanies abstraction echoes the debates within science about the value of numbers over images. As with the embrace of quantitative modes, the interest in abstraction derives in part from its ability to move beyond historical or subjective associations into a realm of pure form. But the landscape enters through the back door. W. J. T. Mitchell identifies a commonality in modernism’s quest for a pure visual language of abstraction and the search for a perfect mirror of the landscape. He compares them, writing that “on the one hand, the goal is nonrepresentational painting, freed of reference, language, and subject matter; on the other hand, pure hyperrepresentational painting, a superlikeness that produces ‘natural representations of nature.’”2 Both efforts strive to achieve the truest representation, an absolute translation of the world into an image. 177 FROM UNKNOWN FRONTIERS TO FAMILIAR PLACES Abstract expressionism offers another possible set of comparisons. In the Heritage Project’s Veil Nebula, filigrees of colored light bend and twist through the image , and one could imagine it as an electrified version of Jackson Pollock’s drips and splashes (Figure 48). Supernova Remnant E0102 in the Small Magellanic Cloud with its shifts in color—browns that bleed...