Another issue that quickly comes up when using a telescope is that one doesn’t look straight on at the observed, but rather a viewer must avert their gaze slightly, in order to see an image more fully. We all have a dead spot located at the back of our eye where the optic nerve is attached. Our brain compensates, covering this dead zone with information gathered peripherally. This is more challenging when peering into the dark and narrow barrel of a Barlow lens.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision) Paintings are often clinically documented by being photographed dead on. However, in order to truly apprehend a painting, it must be examined from several vantage points.

Constellations, like the Big Dipper, are projections of images that making locating stars easier. However, the apparent fixity of constellations is an illusion, an image based on an asterism. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(astronomy) ). The image of a constellation only appears ordered, fixed as such, from a specific point of view. We often project images onto clouds, abstract paintings, etc., because our minds are wired to do that by evolution (E.O. Wilson, Consilience). Again, the full apprehension of a subject depends on more than one viewpoint. It’s amazing how complicated simply seeing anything can be. The universe has a quality of abstraction, in that it becomes unrecognizable beyond one point of view.

Some abstract paintings can be described, like heavenly gas clouds, as nebulous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula). The hazy area surrounding comets is known as a coma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(comet)). These terms are as concrete as language can be when describing an area that’s nearly bodiless, or ethereal, not quite atmospheric even. Here’s a place in nature where both art and science intersect with imprecision of language. Part of the discomfort associated with abstract painting lies in its ambiguity (“What does it mean?” “What does this look like?”), and yet this is often a common state of nature. The actual experience of observing these phenomena defines their apprehension, not language. A tornado touched down in my driveway once, words will not capture the fullness, or terror, of that experience. I’m not sure words can fully capture the experience, the quiet, the strange stillness, of standing outside in the eye of a hurricane either.

Everyone has seen an image of Saturn at some point, and there’s no denying its singular, universal, beauty. Yet the images most of us know, from the Hubble space telescope, or National Geographic magazine, are all highly manipulated. Saturn looks nothing like these pushed color gods when viewed live from a telescope, and yet nothing matches that exact excitement either, of viewing a moving planet, live, in person, under the night sky, seeing Saturn the same way Galileo first did, in full relief, in 1610.