You may have noticed this image in the newspapers over the past few days. It is one of the first produced from data supplied by the James Webb space telescope – the replacement for the well-known Hubble.
NGC 3324 “Cosmic Cliffs” Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
My blood pressure always rises slightly when I see such things passed off as photographs - as they often are, at least by implication. They aren’t photographs. I wrote a little bit about the sleight of hand by which data visualisation can rather too easily simulate the photographic in an April 2019 blogpost called Black Holes (just scroll down far enough below and you will come to it). Imagine my delight then to read an article in ArtReview magazine by Pippa Goldschmidt which set out the whole issue rather more fully than I did. You can find the article here and in my view it is a must-read for anyone with pretensions to visual literacy today. (And you can read NASA’s own gushing prose here. They even talk of the “crisp resolution” of the telescope’s NIRcam (Near Infra-Red Camera)).
I won’t steal her thunder but in her article Pippa points out that NASA has a whole team dedicated to the conversion of the numerical data sent back by the telescope into a visual image. The range of colours used even has a name: The Hubble Palette. And if you think that the image above is vaguely reminiscent of something then…..well, just read the article.
We spend our lives peering out through this letterbox apparently formed by our two eyes. It is perhaps a natural endeavour for the NASA team to try to stuff the vastness of the space into an envelope small enough to post through that letterbox. Might it not be wiser, though, to accept that the unknowable is unknowable? What we cannot see, we cannot see - no matter how much we believe it to exist. What NASA is doing seems to me to be much the same as a medieval artist painting angels. It’s an act of faith.