The Changing Way We’ve Pictured Space
Feb 01, 2022
How we picture space and our world within it has changed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. As astronauts travelled to space for the first time, they shared images of Earth and space with those of us still on the ground.
What did pictures of space look like before?
When we tried to picture the Moon before travelling there, while we had images from telescopes, we also relied upon our imagination.
Artist Chesley Bonestell pulled from the best available science to inform his work, but ultimately took artistic leaps when painting landscapes of other planets in the 1940s and 1950s. We know now that his Lunar Landscape looks very different from the actual Moon, but in 1957 when it was painted, this was Bonestell’s best vision of our expectations. (He completed the painting in the same year that Sputnik, the Earth’s first artificial satellite, took to the skies.) Lunar Landscape remains a masterful, if outdated, vision from a time when people could only dream of space travel.
How did our images of space change with space travel?
When lunar probes, followed by astronauts, reached the Moon, we knew Bonestell’s mural was not accurate. Actual pictures from space replaced our imaginings of what it looked like, and soon flooded popular culture. Examples abound thanks to photos taken by astronauts of the Moon and the Earth itself.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module (LM) "Eagle" during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity (EVA). Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. (Courtesy of NASA)
Consider this snapshot of Buzz Aldrin taken during the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. We see the imagery reappear everywhere from fine art like Robert Shore’s 1970 Lunar Confrontation, and popular culture, such as MTV’s “Moonman” award.
This “Moonman” statue is the award given by MTV during its annual Video Music Awards ceremony. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum)
In 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts saw the Earth fully lit as a globe for the first time. Previously, a photograph of the “full Earth” was simply not possible because of the alignment of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. This was the only lunar mission to have the opportunity to capture such an image.
The "Whole Earth" photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew. (Courtesy of NASA)
You’ve probably seen this image before. It’s been widely used, again in fine art and popular culture.
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“It was a beautiful, harmonious, peaceful–looking planet, blue with white clouds and one that gave you a deep sense…of home, of being, of identity.”
Angela Manno replicates the Whole Earth image in this piece. The quotation Manno placed at the bottom of the batik, from Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell, mirrors what many others have said about how the global implications of the Apollo 17 image reshaped their views about humanity’s relationship to our planet. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum)
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“The greatest fallout of the space program was not a close–up view of the moon, but a look at spaceship Earth from afar. For the first time in the history of humanity, we were able to see our planet for what it really is.”
–Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, former president, University of Notre DameThe Earth not only seems more delicate because of the “Whole Earth” photograph, but it also has a spaceship–like quality when seen alone against the vastness of space. Manno’s artwork and chosen quotation work together here to express the uniqueness of life on Earth. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum).
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The environmental movement, which had celebrated the first Earth Day only two years before Apollo 17’s flight, adopted the image as its symbol.
As we continued exploring space, how we pictured our world and our place in the universe continued to change. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, changed how we saw galaxies and the farthest reaches of our universe. For instance, for ten days in December 1995, Hubble looked deep into space—and back in time. Using the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, scientists took 342 separate exposures that they assembled into one image: the Hubble Deep Field.
Covering a patch of sky only about the width of a dime as seen from 75 feet (23 meters) away, the Hubble Deep Field revealed at least 1,500 galaxies in various stages of evolution. “As the images have come up on our screens,” Hubble director Robert Williams said, “we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this.”
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This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, is packed with a cluster of galaxies along with a few foreground stars. Hubble received priority status in the 1970s Decadal Survey, was funded, and became the first of NASA’s Great Observatories to be launched into space. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Pacaud, D. Coe)
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According to NASA:
Resembling a wide-brimmed hat with a tall bulge at the center, galaxy M104 is nicknamed the Sombrero Galaxy. Far larger than any hat on Earth, this Sombrero is 50,000 light-years wide. We see the galaxy nearly edge-on, so the dark dust in its pancake-like disk appears to bisect a large, white, rounded core of stars. Roughly 29 million light-years away, the Sombrero can be spotted with a modest telescope in the constellation Virgo.
Using Hubble, a team of astronomers led by John Kormendy of the University of Hawaii found evidence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Sombrero Galaxy. Estimated to be as massive as a billion Suns, it's one of the heftiest black holes in the neighboring universe.
Hubble observations also reveal that the Sombrero Galaxy includes nearly 2,000 globular clusters — 10 times more than in our galaxy. Globular clusters are giant, spherical-shaped groups of stars that are sometimes older than the galaxy in which they reside. The Sombrero's globular clusters range from 10 billion to 13 billion years old, similar to those in the Milky Way.
Several teams of astronomers have used Hubble and telescopes on the ground to study the Sombrero's globular clusters. They've found that some clusters are rich in elements heavier than helium (which astronomers call "metals") and some are poor. Among other findings, the observations reveal that the "metal-rich" clusters are concentrated in the galaxy's bulge and that they are typically smaller than the "metal-poor" ones. Such studies are helping astronomers figure out how ancient globular clusters developed early in the universe's history.
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In the years since 1995, images (and multimedia) from space continue to amaze us, and change how we think and represent space back here on Earth.
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