Week 9 Space + Art

I have always been fascinated by space. However, it was only when I visited Iceland last summer that I got to witness the artistic beauty of space. The dancing lights of the aurora, better known as the northern lights or Aurora borealis, are formed due to collisions between gaseous particles in the earth’s atmosphere with charged particles from the suns atmosphere. I had only seen pictures of the northern lights before, but as we were in our car driving the sky began to turn green, and I felt like I was in a painting. The northern lights were a natural occurrence of art and science and it was truly beautiful.

It was not until 1960 that an actual image of earth was captured by a Russian satellite (Miller, 2013). It is extremely interesting to look at artists depictions of what earth looked like before an image of earth was widely available for people to see. Everyone knew what the shapes of the continents were but artists still had to accurately depict earth’s cloud cover to make their paintings realistic. The similarity between the paintings and what earth looks like is truly remarkable.

Painting by Chesley Bonestell, 1956

Anthropocentricity is a philosophical viewpoint that argues that humans are the center of the Universe. Looking back through history to analyze how theories about space were accepted, teaches us a lot about our anthropocentric nature. The Church believed in geocentricism, implying that the earth was at the center of the universe. Aristarchus (c. 310-230 B.C.) was probably the first to suggest that the earth orbits the sun. Copernicus (1473-1543) then begun the Copernican revolution, seriously challenging the geocentric paradigm (Benett, 2010). However it was not until 1822, that the Church officially agreed with the heliocentric theory (Long, 2008). It is extremely interesting to note that evidence for a heliocentric world had been there for over two millennia, yet an authority figure like the Church could suppress an idea so revolutionary.

The geocentric model of our solar system

 References

Bennett, Jeffrey O. The Cosmic Perspective. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2010. Print.

Long, Tony. "Sept. 11, 1822: Church Admits It's Not All About Us." WIRED. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 May 2015. <http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/09/dayintech_0911>.

Miller, Ron. "How Artists Once Imagined the Earth Would Look from Space." Io9. N.p., Mar. 2013. Web. 29 May 2015. <http://io9.com/how-artists-once-imagined-the-earth-would-look-from-spa-455728227>.

"Northern Lights." Or Aurora Borealis Explained. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 May 2015. <http://www.northernlightscentre.ca/northernlights.html>.

Vesna, Victoria. "8 Space Intro 1280x720." YouTube. YouTube, July 2013. Web. 29 May 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dPAmpBiVHY>.