Space In View

Elizabeth Kessler, a professor at Stanford, published Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime in 2012. This is her argument for the space telescope's value in creating images of the universe in bright colors that everyone can understand. And not only understand, but savor like an experience of a vast mountain range, Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon - in other words, the experience of the Sublime.

 

The Sublime has been a topic of philosophical and literary discussion since the days of the Roman rhetorician Longinus (1st Century CE) and more recently Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. The debate has become a standard among academics and their discussions, centered on the difference  between a visual sublime and a reasoned sublime, or an emotional sublime and a mathematical sublime. No matter, for us non-academics, the point is that there are some things in the world that are beyond exciting, stimulating or arousing. There are some things that are mind-blowing (to use a dramatic visual from the sixties). The Grand Canyon may be the paradigm in the natural world, due to the immensity of the canyon (a mile wide, over a half-mile deep). To stand at the rim of this monstrous hole is to feel something like a pull into the vastness, which is terrifying and that combined with the spectacular natural beauty of the place equals the Sublime experience.

 

It is along these lines that Professor Kessler argues for the inclusion of images of deep-space novelties such as the Horsehead Nebula and the Butterfly Nebula in the discussion of the Sublime. She argues strenuously that these pictures, numbering in the 10s of thousands, should be considered windows on the sublimity of the limitless expanses of the Universe. She says they may be a new vision of the infinite, or at least a glance at the cold indifference of the expanse of mostly empty space from which we came and to which we will return.

 

I enjoyed reading the book, and I enjoyed getting into Kessler’s discussion of what the pictures showed. But a few things bothered me as I read about the way the beautiful colors were made (that not the way the nebulae actually look - the images are enhanced for effect). One problem is the scale. I'd like to know that these cloud-like, smoky manifestations of dust and gravity, are a certain number of light years away and a certain number of light years in depth, width and height.  I can accept that the wily astronomer cannot actually figure out these dimensions down to the square mile, or even to the square light year, but why not give me a ball-park? Or an analogy. (e.g. it is wider than a million football fields; or, 100 dollar bills, placed end-to-end, would pay the national debt a billion times before reaching from one end of this galaxy to the other.) But there is nothing in the book that will ground the reader in anything understandable.

 

This brings me to the central conundrum of the pictures.  On the surface,  they are beautiful abstractions, but when you read the discussions of their depth and subtle ranges of color, I just didn’t  see it. It's too easy to see them as abstracts and too hard, unless truly compelled by Kessler's verbal description, to see them as heavenly bodies. Indeed, Kessler stretches her argument to the breaking point when she compares the forms seen in the Hubble images with similar shapes and color to be found in the epic landscapes of the 19^th century painters Bierstadt or Moran. I cringed when she led me through a specious comparison of the colors and spiritual intensions supposedly illustrated by Rothko to the fluffy pretensions of the Trifid Nebula or various galaxies where stars are “being born”.

I will admit to seeing something in a few of the pictures. The Eagle Nebula, apparently bursting like time-lapse debris from an explosion, shown bright against the empty blackness of space gave me a little vertigo because my mind could not grasp what was beyond the shape. But then I am not an astronomer.