11/04/2022
There it is! Ophiuchus - an enormous dust cloud deep in the inconceivable expanse that is The Universe. Captured in the silver halide crystals, on this little piece of gelatinous film, is a moment in time, in a section of space so far away that a human traveling there at light speed (clearly currently impossible) would be lucky to make the trip in a life time (81.8 light years). In a space shuttle of todays standards the journey would take over 3 million years. Yet here, right in front of me, a miniature copy of the intricate dynamics of the swirls and wisps that were unfolding in this location at the time that my grandmother was born, is enjoying a final soak in its spa before it joins its friends Orion, Perseus, Chameleon and Cepheus on the drying shelf. Even though the concept has been clear to me throughout this entire project it actually completely took my breath away to be standing there, alone in the dark, realising that I am most likely the first human to have enjoyed the sight of this particular part of very distant space. At least in this tangible, three dimensional, form. My holograms have transformed the information collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, from points in a data set that can only be navigated with pretty clunky astronomy specific software, into what looks like an actual object, hovering right in front of me, close enough that I could touch it.
Thank you and the whole team at the Space Telescope Science Institute for trusting me to deliver. What a tremendous honour to be the person to birth these images into our world. And of course none of this would have been possible without my trusty lab partner Walter Spierings and his team at Dutch Holographic Laboratories.
The next step will be to finalise the 50x 60cm pieces that are going on a trip around this little dust ball, together with Joshua and his friends.
