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Apr
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
April 24, 2008 |
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If told I could go anywhere—and I mean absolutely anywhere—my first choice would be Naiad. It’s a tiny moon orbiting Neptune at less than thirty-thousand miles. Neptune’s closest known satellite, I think it would provide a spectacular view of one of the most amazing planets in the solar system. And, with the demotion of Pluto, Neptune is officially the farthest planet in the solar system. I know it’s not realistic; for one thing the amount of radiation put out by all the gas giants would, at that proximity, kill me pretty quickly. Oh yeah, there’s also the question of getting there. At about 2.7 billion miles it would take a little over four hours at the speed of light, but, so far no one’s built anything that comes close to that fast. Still, a guy can dream, right?
And there is space art, which, according to an article in the Boston Globe, is a field experiencing kind of a renaissance. Artists like David Aguilar, whose book 11 Planets: A New View Of The Solar System was published last month, attempt to combine an artist’s perspective with the scientist’s, in a sense trying to see the unseeable. This isn’t, strictly speaking, science fiction, as the artists consult with scientists to try and produce visions that are scientifically accurate. And it may be several years before we can judge how close the artists were. For instance, compare a 1944 vision of Titan by Chesley Bonestell to the pictures sent back by the Cassini mission. The differences are striking. I love space art, though, and for most of us these visions help make sense of the language of astronomers; accurate or not they speak to us in ways the technical literature can’t. I’ll keep looking at space art—as long as I’m not looking up.
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