Through the Looking Glass

One night I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging from a galaxy a hundred million light years away. On it was written: I saw you. Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

Last night I stepped outside under a Rene Magritte sky, its crescent moon a fingernail sliver of light edging the lunar disk like a dusty chocolate Necco Wafer. The moon seemed so close, so familiar, like a ball you have played with all summer. No wonder: we have dreamed and loved under cover of the moon, adorned it with our richest offerings, encircled it like a probing tongue- it is our most intimate celestial other, our barren sibling whom we still love. Beginning in the nineteenth century, National Geographic brought exotic cultures and landscapes almost impossible to imagine within the naturalizing context of the Victorian parlor. More recently, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and assorted space probes like Voyager and Pathfinder have helped to familiarize, photographically at least, the neighborhood of our own solar system, be it Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere, the Martian “canals,” or the granular iciness of the Kuiper Belt.

The Space Telescope Science Institute, which administers HST, is situated on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in a nondescript building virtually indistinguishable from the parking garage across the street. The Hubble is nothing less than a keyhole through which the beginnings of time and space can be glimpsed, yet like the cliché of the disheveled scientist who cares little for outward appearances but whose mind is full of faraway places, the Institute’s banal facade seems entirely out of keeping with the high drama happening inside. HST was launched on April 24, 1990, and is now one year older than its planned 15-year life span. In that ensuing decade and a half, this school-bus sized satellite has revolutionized cosmography and sparked the popular imagination in a manner not seen since Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969. At ten billion times more sensitive than the human eye, the Hubble’s observational power is astonishing. And if that doesn’t impress you, the official HST website states: “If you could see as well as the Hubble you could stand in New York City and distinguish two fireflies one meter apart in San Francisco.”

 

Richard Panek opens his lovely meditation on the history of the telescope, Seeing and Believing (1998), with the sentence: “On January 15, 1996 the universe grew by 40 billion galaxies.” This is the release date of what is now known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the deepest image of the universe ever taken with visible light. To avoid interference from the light and dust of the Milky Way, Hubble scientists began by pointing the device at a relatively empty and small portion of the sky near the Big Dipper, comparable to looking at a dime from 75 feet away. Over the course of 150 earth orbits and 276 exposures, taking a kind of “core sample” of the universe, HST absorbed the ancient light of galaxies that appear to us as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, moments really, in cosmological time, after the Big Bang.

Deep within that seemingly vacant patch of sky there gradually appeared a stunning tapestry of unknown galaxies, all sparkling like shards of moonstone and emerald, sugarcoated rubies and icy-blue diamonds illuminated from within. Beyond its magisterial dimensions, HUDF also brought about an unprecedented revolution in universal perspective: possibly no other image in recorded history has revealed in such stark visual terms the absolute irrelevance of our teensy-weensy neck of the cosmic woods. At the same time, mapping this primeval background allowed scientists to project forward to our own relatively infantile realm, making vast reaches of time and space almost palpable. At long last, all astrophysical claims concerning history’s chain of cause and effect tracing back to the prime singularity had found a visible face. And to judge by this picture, infinity turns out to be big but not unimaginable, and forever long but not endless.

 

Although color “lithographs” of particularly stunning HST imagery are distributed like after-dinner mints to audiences at public lectures at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the astronomers joke that Hubble is a popular source for screensaver imagery. “Come for the pictures and stay for the science,” commands the HST website. However, Hubble scientists are skeptical of the perceived beauty of such images and the public’s attraction to them. Like a Lutheran mistrustful of Roman Catholic devotion to the idolatry of saints, they fear iconographic seduction may blind people to the true “God” of science. With many astronomers today leaning toward the more abstract form of invisible light advanced by the now dominant theory of dark matter (which allegedly makes up 99 percent of the universe), scientists may be justified in becoming slightly dismissive of celestial eye candy. Nevertheless, Earth’s inhabitants are completely hooked on this new starry sublime, however much these reveries may be colored by religious or mystical emotional baggage. I, for one, have no difficulty transferring my childhood reverence for church stained glass to HUDF imagery. In fact, without some broad guiding symbolism I doubt any sentient being can grasp the idea and scope of the infinite.

Before the sixteenth century, the sky was the symbolic realm par excellence. Every full moon, setting sun, eclipse, comet, shooting star, and astrological icon resonated with allegory and profound portent. As far back as 400 B.C, a Chaldean observer of the heavens named Kidunnu had mathematically established the regularity of lunar eclipses, even though for a millennium afterwards the inconstant moon still continued to cause panic in the minds of kings and commoners alike. And even if Aristotle himself had proclaimed the Earth round, a revolutionary notion in his or any latter day, he also followed convention by placing it at the center of the universe. During the Hellenic and later Roman/Christian eras, the heavens acted as a kind of cosmic theater, according to which comets were gaseous “exhalations” emanating from the body of Earth like prayers ascending to heaven. It was the duty of God’s creatures to decipher these messages.

The broad outlines of the ascent of modern astronomy are familiar enough. Before Copernicus, except for a few minor Greek and Arab philosophers, it was universally believed that the Sun and planets revolved around the earth inside a crystalline sphere of fixed stars, the so-called Ptolemaic system. But the limited circulation and posthumous censorship of De revolutionibus orbium celestium (1543) did little to popularize the alternate, heliocentric system. Illustrating Christian theology’s dependence upon geocentricity, Church manuscripts at the time commonly portrayed the cosmos with hosts of angels singing praise to the Heavenly Father enthroned vaingloriously beyond the stars. Then, some decades before the invention of the telescope, the Scanian astronomer Tycho Brahe was deeded an estate on the island of Hven by the Danish king, where he built the Western world’s first observatory and christened it Uraniborg, “City of Heaven.” It was here in 1577 that Tycho’s observations of an unusually conspicuous comet helped to contradict Aristotle’s assertion that comets were atmospheric exhalations, showing them instead to be peripatetic bodies. The proven existence of randomly orbiting bodies also vanquished the long-held notion of supra-lunar symmetry, dashing the established celestial clockwork metaphor.

 

In 1609, after learning of a Dutch optical device that made distant things appear closer, Galileo trained his hand-hewn spyglass at the night sky, discovering, among other novelties, “blackish spots” sprinkled across the lunar surface and moons encircling Jupiter. Constituting one of the greatest scoops in pre-modern times, in a single stroke Galileo had found visual evidence in support of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, not only clearing a path for Newton and the new planetary system, but also the unwelcome animosity of the Church and its theocratic worldview. It was a long-drawn-out affair, the renegade scientist patiently enduring long nights staring into the eyepiece of his beloved telescope, both challenging and provoking the superstitions and dogmas of an age. Eventually the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the construction of larger, more perfect lenses, allowing astronomers to look more clearly and deeply into space. On June 26, 1730, while searching for comets, the Frenchman Charles Messier closely observed a number of distant nebulae, among them our closest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31. Messier ultimately went on to develop a system for cataloging bright nebulous objects still in use today. Later in the century, Englishman William Hershel carried out an exhaustive, panoramic scan of the heavens, establishing the Milky Way as a vast organization of stars, in terms of which our solar system appears as a mere scattering of dust in the galactic vastness.

 

The nineteenth century saw the inevitable marriage of astronomy and photography. Indeed, lunar mapping was one of the first uses made of the newly announced daguerreotype in 1839, although long exposure times and atmospheric interference made sharply defined images difficult to attain. In the ensuing decades, technological improvements like the dry plate process allowed almost any amateur with a decent camera and telescope to take detailed pictures of the moon. And astronomers increasingly turned their attention to mapping the whole sky. In 1887, the Paris Observatory coordinated the gathering of reliable starmaps or cartes du ciel by 18 observatories around the world, for which the photographic plate would act as “the scientist’s true retina.”

A photograph is always a shadow or “film” of the past, but in astronomical terms the perceived object being photographed is literally long gone. Photons streaming from a supernova, say, travel countless zillions of miles ducking through earth’s atmosphere to pass through a little piece of polished glass that gathers and magnifies the light’s relative dimness, directing it onto an absorbent emulsion made from silver and gelatin. That photograph of an exploding star is from the inconceivable past, a celestial spectacle that may have occurred before humans even evolved. Part of that perspectival foreshortening can be glimpsed in photograph her Linda Connor’s deliverance of celestial imagery from the Lick Observatory archive. Reapplying the appropriate nineteenth-century photographic process to the Lick’s glass plates, Connor exposes the source material using the sun’s ultraviolet light, which reaches earth a mere eight minutes after leaving the solar surface. With this light of a much more recent vintage, Connor resuscitates the ghostly traces of stars whose photographic glow began eons, before the dawn of human history.

As far as we earthlings are concerned, until the twentieth century the universe was comprised of a single galaxy. The question of anything lying beyond our tiny self-contained realm was little more than scientific speculation or fodder for late-night reverie among artists, poets, and assorted fantasists. This delusion held fast until Edwin Hubble established M31 as a separate galaxy, consisting of billions of stars. More spectacularly and earth shatteringly, in 1929 he demonstrated that galaxies are actually moving away from one another with ever increasing speed, proving that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. None other than Einstein had earlier stumbled on this concept but thought it too far-fetched, eventually explaining the anomaly away with his awkward and unprovable Cosmological Constant, which he later admitted, was the biggest blunder of his life. Hubble’s expanding universe laid the groundwork for the currently dominant Big Bang theory.

 

With each new discovery humanity’s centrality in the heavens has fallen a notch, our relative insignificance growing in inverse proportion to our awareness of the enormity and complexity of the uppermost realms. Religion and superstition have always functioned to stem the resulting gash in our ego ideals whenever we attempt to comprehend the infinite or eternal. Although not the only fact-based science to challenge religious dogma, astronomical observation begs larger-than-life questions because it literally frames the big picture. Pointing telescopes skyward catalyzed a major paradigm shift, in which the world theater of God’s omniscient eye eternally overseeing his creation from on high ended up being overturned by a more proactive, returned gaze whereby humanity could at last begin to reset the terms of its existence.

A late-nineteenth-century preview of this radical new gestalt exists in Odilon Redon’s  Eye Balloon in which an insistent orb stares “fixed upon the incomprehensible.” In place of the balloon’s basket is a decapitated head, suggesting the necessary sacrifice of the Heavenly Father/King to liberate humanity from its earthbound destiny.  Redon’s previous works are filled with upwardly gazing martyrs, supplicants to God’s mercy. But in this case at least, the French Symbolist represents modernity’s challenge to the chains of gravity and a brave new world of unfettered perception, suggesting that when humans stare back, God might blink.

 

Originally Published in artUS, Issue 14, July-September, 2006