Light Reading: Reeling in the Mysteries "Out There"

The world’s most sophisticated camera system isn’t actually a camera at all. For the most part, it’s a network of earthbound telescopes and a spherical nimbus of orbiting image-gathering satellites, with sensors tuned to wavelengths that span the electromagnetic spectrum. Its multifarious eyes, or what pass for eyes, are trained on the near, the far, and the unfathomably farthest reaches of the universe.

Without these extraordinary techno-wonders—the orbiters in particular like Hubble, Chandra, SOHO, GALEX, et al., along with their intra-solar system brethren: Viking, Voyager, Magellan, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens—all poking into the affairs of our countless stellar and planetary neighbors, the human race would still fall dismally short of understanding the showy array of twinkling dots that fill our night sky. As it is, even with the most exotic deep-space probes at our disposal, it’s still difficult for most of us to get our heads around the reality that those dots are really anything more than… well, dots.

In the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, the acid-tongued reporter, Hornbeck, waxes cynical on this subject, grumbling that when early man “first achieved the upright position, he took a look at the stars and thought they were something to eat. When he couldn’t reach them, he decided they were groceries belonging to a bigger creature.” In a way, not much has changed in that scenario. Notwithstanding our hi-tech team of silently orbiting paparazzi, to most of us, permanently fixed on terra firma, those are still dots, and we still consign the black carpet beyond to a mysterious realm we call “out there.”

Zooming in on “The Dots”
A few years ago, the Minneapolis-based publication design team of Will Hopkins and Mary K. Baumann (see this month’s Rangefinder profile of Hopkins, pg. 10) produced what, to date, remains one of the best efforts ever in print, to reel in that mystery realm. What’s Out There: Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe is a stunning annotated picture collection that draws on imagery from the entire spectrum of orbiting and Earth-based image-capture technology. How extraordinary when our most durable workhorse, Hubble, zooms in on one of the “dots” to show us a spread-sized, eye-popping shot of the Firestorm Nebula, the largest known cauldron of star formation in our current universal field of vision. Another dot comes to us, in close-up, as luminescent gases blowing from a black hole; still another is a rare light echo, the lingering vestigial glow from an exploding supernova, 20,000 light years from Earth. From inside our solar system, the non-twinkling dots of neighboring planets and their satellite moons are here as well, enlarged in intimate detail by orbiting cameras that have swept into the gravitational fields of Mars and Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. There’s the Jovian moon, Io, appearing to float across a corner-to-corner bleed shot of Jupiter’s familiar swirling gases, and, on another spread, an image from the same orbiter, Voyager 1, taken at the very moment of a massive eruption from Io’s largest volcano, Pele, with a plume of white hot ejecta leaping into black space.

Aside from meticulous (and no doubt ma­niacally press-checked) color re­pro‑
­duction, the engine that drives this book is the impeccable editorial design sense of Hopkins and Baumann, who use the power of such images as a tool for communicating information, rather than just to create a frothy display of pretty pictures. The book had its genesis in the innovative children’s magazine, Kids Discover, which Hopkins/Baumann produced for over 15 years. “We did about 12 issues on various aspects of space,” Hopkins recalls. “Galaxies, the solar system, Mars, astronauts. We decided it was time to produce a book, in which we’d match a seminal image of some phenomenon with clear and precise text.”

This simple structure accounts for much of What’s Out There’s appeal, but the book is by no means a kiddie-car tour of the cosmos. When it comes to the complex physics of the universe—ideas like warped galaxies and singularities, or even comprehending the magnitude of interstellar distances—the great majority of us, at all ages, are still in a state of intellectual infancy. Hopkins and Baumann, with co-authors Loralee Nolletti and astrophotography specialist Michael Soluri, address that reality, joining each of the books’ 180 high-definition images with concise, readable text blocks. On nebulas, for example, the “key players” of star formation: “The process begins with the contraction of dark globules within the nebula. Globules contract until they collapse under the force of their own gravity, precipitating the birth of stars.” On the baffling phenomenon of the “singularity” at the core of a black hole: it’s “a scrunched piece of the universe with almost no volume and infinite density.” Black holes, the passage explains, form when massive stars—many orders of magnitude larger than our sun—blast themselves out of existence. But the result of this colossal astronomic event, the singularity, “always remains smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.”

Hawking’s Touchstone
The user-friendly theme of What’s Out There continues beyond this informative and dazzling 171-page compendium of astrophotography. There’s a highly useful glossary as well, plus an illustrated guide to the vast panoply of space imaging hardware, and a concise treatise on the science behind the creation of the book’s images, authored by noted astronomy educator and writer Ray Villard.

But, if there’s one touchstone for the refreshing simplicity of What’s Out There’s approach to mankind’s single most complex field of intellectual endeavor, it’s the brief foreword by renowned scientist and author Stephen Hawking—a man who holds the academic post once chaired by Sir Isaac Newton. Even Hawking’s most lucid, best-selling explorations of physical science, A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, are a stretch for even the best-educated minds.

“I do not believe,” Hawking writes, concluding what may be his four most readable paragraphs ever, “that we will ever reach the end of our quest for a complete understanding of the universe, and, in a way, I’m glad. Science, after finding all the answers, would be like mountaineering after Everest.”
This humble admission should come as a relief to those closet mental cavemen among us, still contemplating those dots in the night sky as someone else’s groceries.

A regular contributor to Rangefinder, Jim Cornfield is a veteran commercial photographer and travel writer based in Malibu Canyon, CA. Formerly feature editor of Petersen’s PHOTOGraphic magazine, Cornfield has published three books and hundreds of magazine articles in a career that spans 30 years.