Witnessing the Unwitnessable :: Essays Papers

Witnessing the Unwitnessable Against a sinister canvas glimmer countless particles of clear up. Some assert themselves as diminutive pinpricks while others pool into swirls of color on the ebony backdrop. A cursory glance at these speckles might discern them as nothing solely stochasticness, but a closer examination reveals a certain soul of artisanic unity. Their palette is simple shades of black, lily-white, yellow, blue, red, orange while their details are elegant. A whirl of gold dances nears a splotch of lazuline a daub of dainty pink resembles a rose drops of off-white encircle a void like a pearl necklace lacy, white tendrils reach toward a spray of amber. These descriptions might hint at a painting, but in this case, the image in question has no artist it is a photograph of deep space produced by the Hubble Space compass slamn as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Taken of a random patch of sky no larger than a grain of keystone over a period of t hree months, this photograph contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies, each of them billions of long time old. This single, tiny frame has captured the profound immensities and beautiful harmony of the universe in an image that defies comprehension. The blackness of the night sky belies the menagerie of color and light hidden from our eyes. Many cosmological objects are too faint to be seen, many emit wavelengths of light our eyes do not know how to respond to, and many (the far side of the moon, for example) are impossible to descry from Earths surface. Astrophotography, which will here be broadly define as the capturing of all images of space, provides a keyhole through which we may view celestial spectacles we would never normally see. Photons, particles of light, are often the only record we have of the existence of the vast majority of the objects in the universe. By committing these photons to photographic plates or pixels, astrophotographers capture an imprin t testifying that whatever emitted them exists somewhere in the infinity. take photons gives us the power to transform a remote and unimaginable wandflower into a real and tangible photograph. Even more important, viewing astrophotography raises questions approximately the fundamental nature of both ourselves and the universe.