Seeing Beyond Sight: Astronomical Images and the Aesthetics of the Sublime

Over the last several decades, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to look deep into the Universe, a practice that continues with the James Webb Space Telescope. The images from these instruments, as well as those from ground-based telescopes and space probes, have introduced us to a celestial plentitude: pictures of galaxies that glitter with millions of points of light and nebulae that reach upward as giant gaseous columns; panoramas of Martian landscapes and close-ups of its geological features; aerial views of Jupiter’s swirling clouds and Saturn’s many rings in brilliant hues; visual reconstructions of black holes outlined in glowing orange.

Such cosmic pictures are based on scientific data, but they must address a vexing question: How to represent what our lies beyond our sight? This talk will consider how the aesthetics of astronomical images aid in the task. In particular, it will trace a recurring engagement with the rhetorical and visual tropes of the sublime, whether a resemblance to 19th-century landscape paintings of the American West or a reprise of the psychedelic styles of 1960s counterculture. Through the aesthetics of the sublime, astronomical images convey the awesomeness of reaching beyond our sensory limits, even as the familiarity of these tropes tame or contain the potentially terrifying aspects of transcendence.

Speaker: Elizabeth Kessler, Stanford University