17.6: Art and Astronomy

Science and Society - Art and Astronomy

This final section of science and society touches on the intersection of art and science, and is attributed by the academic publication Visualizing the Universe. This article explores a collaboration between a professional artist and a professional astronomer. We hope in reading about and viewing their collaborative work, you can come away with greater appreciation for how deeply intertwined these two fields really are.

Intersections of Art and Science

The beauty of the night sky and the mysteries of the universe have captured the imagination of both scientists and artists since the beginning of recorded history. We are struck by a profound sense of wonder and amazement when pondering the cosmos. 

Astronomy and art have a longstanding relationship. Astronomy is an intensely visual subject. Before photography, the only way to represent objects in the sky was with a drawing or a painting. Artists of the past helped astronomers see and record natural phenomena, which in turn stimulated questions about our place in the universe. Art communicated ideas which enriched the culture and led to advances in ways of visualizing remote and unfamiliar environments. Even in the age of digital imagery, art is important for connecting us to the skies.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Sketches of the topography of the Moon, showing geological features and craters, by Galileo Galilei, from the Sidereus Nuncius (1610). (Public Domain; Galileo Galilei via Wikimedia Commons).

The intersection of art and astronomy is important for a broader cultural reason. In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered a lecture where he lamented the gulf between science and the arts. He argued that practitioners on both sides should build bridges, for the progress of human knowledge and the benefit of society. As in most academic fields, professional astronomers are educated almost exclusively in the narrow area of the physical sciences, often entirely missing out on other important aspects of communicating science, such as how to depict their findings to the general public. This fact has created a reliance on artists other creators to depict the physical phenomena in textbooks, articles, and other formats that astronomers want to produce their findings. Such reliance ultimately means that scientists and artists must find common understanding and vision to create a final product for publication.

Chris Impey and Dinah Jasensky are a husband and wife team who collaborate on science and art. Chris is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona who does research on observational cosmology, and Dinah is a professional artist with a background in environmental science.

The sky as seen by the naked eye is limited to the Sun and the Moon, five planets that appear as little more than dots, a few dozen nebulae and star clusters, three galaxies, and the ragged beauty of the Milky Way. Modern telescopes give astronomers enormous light grasp but they are still limited by what telescopes can see and cameras can record. Large telescopes have small fields of view, so are looking at tiny patches of sky, and the atmosphere blurs the details of distant objects. More fundamentally, our view of the universe is limited by our position in time and space. An artist can visualize a scene that no telescope or spacecraft will ever see: the fog deep within a star formation region, the event horizon of an accreting black hole, or the surface of an Earth–like exoplanet.

A central goal of the collaboration was to go beyond nature as captured by photography and concentrate on the beauty of form, texture or color. The artist can take full measure of the freedom allowed for creative effort and expression. Tools such as composition, value range, color harmony, the quality of light and brushwork are all at the disposal and in the service of the story represented by the painting in Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\).

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): The painting of Mystic Mountain exemplifies the use of color active brushstrokes to convey swirling gas in a
nebula where stars are continuously forming. (CC BY 4.0; Dinah Jasensky via MAA).

When artists join with scientists to explore interests, they are led to mutual learning and new perspective. Disciplinary boundaries can limit both scientist and artist. The astronomer demonstrates fidelity to astrophysics, with a dependence on photography and digital data, while the artist may not fully understand the scale and structure of astronomic phenomena she is trying to represent. Paintings, however, can elicit reactions and emotions that are not triggered by digital images. Artists use color, texture, and composition to visualize the universe in new ways. Art represents nature in a way that adds to scientific knowledge through the artist’s intention and particular perspective. As a result, artistic interpretation remains a critical component of the culture of science.

Exploring the intersection of art and astronomy involves recognizing the strengths and limitations of each discipline. The goal of the collaboration is to combine these strengths and produce work that is more than the sum of the parts. The extra ingredient arises because an artist can visualize a scene that can never be captured by any telescope. When Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge” he could have been commenting on the relationship between art and science.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): The Crucible depicts a red dying star (cool) with surrounding ejected nebulosity, adjacent to a white hot (warm) stellar nursery. (CC BY 4.0; Dinah Jasensky via MAA).

Collaboration benefits the artist by increasing the depth of understanding of astronomical phenomena which alters and shapes aesthetic response. For example, the temperature associated with color is a shared construct that has different meaning to astronomers and artists. In general, an artist represents warmth with yellow, orange and red, and coolness with blue, green and violet as in Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\) below. The opposite is true in astronomy. Artists need to dance a fine line to stay true to the physical phenomena, yet elicit the desired emotional response to an image. Collaboration also benefits the astronomer by loosening the grip of a purely astrophysical way of viewing celestial phenomena. It’s a reminder that every object in the sky is a story waiting to be told with an evocative painting.

Attributions

This page was adapted from "Visualizing the Universe - the Intersection of Art and Astronomy" in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry originally written by Chris Impey, Dinah Jasensky, and published under CC BY 4.0.

References

Snow, C. P. (1961) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Eldred, S. M. (2016) Art–Science Collaborations: Change of Perspective, Nature, Vol. 537, pp. 125–126.

Kemp, M. (2016) Structural Intuitions: Seeing Shapes in Art and Science, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.