Good morning, Raoul!

Your reproductions here of astronomical photographic images have delighted me for years. You have turned the Zone into a small gallery of large art.

The images you post depict their subjects truthfully, yet they are incomplete. Framed by humans who manipulate the lenses, these photographs are limited by the equipment's range and period, as well as by human ability to interpret the results.

When I look at nature photographs, I often think about the photographer out in the world setting up the camera. A photographer whose subject is human has a natural focal point: most humans like looking at other humans. But a photographer whose subject is not human, and has no humans or human structures in his range... what motivates him to choose the angle, the subject, the exposure? Why does he choose to study the place or thing whose photograph we see? His choice is obviously informed by something. Awe. Curiosity. The limits of the equipment, both mechanical and biological. Academic objectives. Cultural bias. Political concerns. Still I wonder what his viewpoint has missed. What was happening behind him while I look over his shoulder to see what he saw?

So one could say that the photographic record in cosmology, though recording genuine moments in cosmologic history, is not accurate in an empirical sense, either. Understanding the recorded moments is subject to the limits of human imagination, preconceptions, and even neurology.

This is good news for those who love space exploration because it uncovers the mysteries of the cosmos, because it means that the story will never be finished.

Paintings and other artistic interpretations of the physical universe are affected even more profoundly by these issues, but the issues are the same. We project what we know through our art. Our artists depict what we expect to see.

Our more visionary artists will pick up sea changes in scientific thought and give them visual expression slightly in advance of public awareness of the debate in the scientific community. Thus Giotto introduced perspective into painting while European mathematicians had just begun to rediscover Euclidean geometry. Cezanne's exploration of space interacting with the objects in a painting, in contrast to former European artistic concepts of space as an empty backdrop in which to arrange objects, acted as a prophecy of our understanding now that space is truly not empty but something with its own properties that acts upon and is acted upon by matter. Magritte's and Dalí's surrealist paintings symbolically challenged our cultural concepts of matter and of linear time while Einstein's special theory of relativity had unsettled scientists' Newtonian universe. And of course, there are always great geniuses, like Newton himself and Leonardo, who straddle the worlds of theory and perception: Leonardo in his artistic depictions of scientific innovation, and Newton in his scientific interpretation of one of the artist's chief tools, in Optics.

These worlds, art and science, are connected at the hip. We generally don't notice because we are too interested in what the hands are doing to shift our focus away from them. Again, we only see what we are prepared to look at.

Joyeuse nouvelle année!
Mary Anne