Straddling the line between art and science, artist Michael Benson creates 77 stunning, true-colour montages of images of our solar system (provided by NASA and the European Space Agency) captured in the six passed decades of space travel.
The cherry on the cake is the original soundscape created by music icon Brian Eno, delicately adding to the exploratory atmosphere and planet mystique. In his own words, "Space is silent. It's a vacuum. In fact we can't really experience space directly at all: even those few humans who've been out there have done so inside precarious cocoons. So we've become used to translating our feelings and understandings about space into metaphors, mental playgrounds where we're allowed to imagine how it could be. That process of imagining is unanchored to experience, unconfined by any demand other than it be in some way true to our feelings. Making music about space, then, is sheer fantasy, or perhaps sheer metaphor.” Well-put, and well-translated into sound - though, naturally, the visuals remain the...star here.
This is an unforgettable astro-voyage - even within the museum walls.
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Warming Comet (courtesy of Flowers Gallery)
The oddly
twin-lobed Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko vents gas and dust about a month
before perihelion – the closest point to the Sun along its orbit. Outflows and
jets of cometary material can be seen as the comet heats up.
Rosetta, 7 July,
2015
Credit:
ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM–CC BY-SA IGO 3.0/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy
of Flowers Gallery
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Dark side of the rings (courtesy of Flowers
Gallery)
This spectacular
view looks down on Saturn’s northern regions, with its pole still in the
darkness of the northern hemisphere winter. The rings cast a band of shadow
across the gas giant world.
Mosaic composite
photograph. Cassini, 20 January 2007.
Credit:
NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
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Late afternoon on Mars (courtesy of Flowers
Gallery)
View of Husband
Hill within Gusev Crater, in the late afternoon light. Husband Hill was named
in memory of Columbia Space Shuttle Commander Rick Husband, who died, along
with six other astronauts, when Columbia disintegrated on entering Earth’s
atmosphere in 2003.
Mosaic composite
photograph. Spirit Rover, 16 April 2006.
Credit:
NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
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Typhoon over Bay of Bengal (courtesy of
Flowers Gallery)
The immense vortex
of tropical Cyclone 03B slams into India’s east coast with wind speeds
approaching 120 kilometres an hour. Below, the teardrop-shaped island of Sri
Lanka is relatively cloud free.
Photograph. Terra,
15 December 2003.
Credit: Jeff
Schmaltz, Lucian Plesea, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/NASA GSFC/Michael
Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
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Crescent Jupiter and Ganymede (courtesy of
Flowers Gallery)
Jupiter’s largest
moon Ganymede, seen here on the right, is the ninth largest object in the solar
system and is bigger than the planet Mercury. Like Europa, Ganymede’s surface
is composed of water ice, and is thought to have a sub-surface ocean.
Mosaic composite
photograph. Cassini, 10 January, 2001
Credit:
NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
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Enceladus
vents water into space (courtesy of Flowers Gallery)
Enceladus, Saturn’s
sixth largest moon, erupts a vast spray of water into space from its southern
polar region. The water immediately freezes. The moon is lit by the Sun on the
left, and backlit by the reflecting surface of its parent planet to the right
(not in this photograph).
Mosaic composite
photograph. Cassini, 25 December 2009.
Credit:
NASA/JPL/Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers
Gallery
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Ground fog in Valles Marineris (courtesy of Flowers
Gallery)
The western part of
the Valles Marineris canyon system is seen here covered in morning water-ice
and water-vapour ground fog. The canyon is more than six and a half kilometres
deep in places, over three times deeper than the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the
United States.
Mosaic composite photograph.
Mars Express, 25 May 2004.
Credit: ESA/Michael
Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
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Moonlight on the Adriatic (courtesy of
Flowers Gallery)
In this luminous
view of southern Europe, the Adriatic Sea with its many islands gleams in
reflected moonlight. In the centre, the Italian peninsula extends into the
Mediterranean Sea. To the lower right, Milan’s road network blazes. South is
up.
Mosaic composite
photograph. ISS 023 crew, 29 April 2010.
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