The photographer Wolfgang Tillmans recently selected his best shot. It’s a black and white photo of the sun showing the transit of Venus, a small black circle in the lower half of the image.
The photo is indistinguishable from many ‘scientific’ images of the Sun. It shows ‘limb-darkening’; the darkening of the sphere at its edges, consistent with the Sun being a three dimensional object. And I think it’s this detail that helps make the photo so interesting.
We can’t look at the Sun directly for any length of time. Our only view of it is by fleeting glances. So it’s curious that we rely on a two dimensional image to remind us that the Sun is three dimensional. Our direct experience cannot show us that.
Therefore the photo allows us to make the link between the sun and the objects in our every day lives, to relate it to our other experiences. I think that’s why I find it quite a moving image. And because it’s in black and white there’s a certain nostalgic aspect to this emotion, conjuring up memories of a book I had when I was a kid; ‘The Sun Our Star’. Is there a certain anxiety to that title, an attempt to reach out and claim something so remote for our own?
I’m off to the Heavenly Discourses conference in a couple of weeks, where I’m talking about the use of literature to investigate astronomy. I’m also hoping to learn more generally about the cultural values accumulated by astronomy in different human civilisations. I shall report back…
2 Comments
Nice! I wonder if it is a colour image? I know it’s not in the hydrogen alpha, but it has a bit of a pink cast, making me wonder if it’s just straight through some astronomy grade foil? Mine come out a bit like that. Great image though. It also raises questions about what ‘colour’ the universe is doesn’t it? Because we would always have to see the sun through a kind of filter thus making it adapted for our eyes, and the hubble images of nebulae are adapted for print and over several wavelengths, so what is the true colour of the sun?
yup – depends what you mean by colour. it’s straightforward to define it as the percentage of light emitted at different wavelengths, but that doesn’t take into account the subjective experience, what actually happens when we look at something.
astronomers define colour in terms of the proportion of light emitted in different wavebands (cf the colour-magnitude diagram).
so you can also experience stars’ colours as black dots on a diagram, which is odd.