Los Angeles Times

Universe of beauty

- — Craig Nakano

They are glorious works of art — turbulent abstractio­ns as well as enchanting portraits of faraway worlds that are the stuff of sci-fi movies. Except they aren’t. These images are from “Earth + Space: Photograph­s From the Archives of NASA,” a Chronicle Books release due next week with text by Nirmala Nataraj.

As Bill Nye, the Science Guy, points out in the opening pages, the artists here are the engineers and scientists who launched the Hubble Space Telescope, generation­s of spaceships and, yes, humans who can click a camera. (Nataraj notes that the first American in space orbit, John Glenn in 1962, brought along a drugstore Ansco camera.)

Across 176 pages we see the picture that Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata tweeted last year: Earth’s crescent moon, glowing through a prism of blue, yellow, orange and red — different wavelength­s of light gathering in our atmosphere. We see the New Horizons spacecraft’s 2007 picture of the moon Io, superimpos­ed over an infrared composite image of Jupiter, where an enduring high-pressure storm — the Great Red Spot — is rendered in a cool blue. Images from Voyager 1 in 1979 allow us to see the same planet’s swirling clouds, moving at 400 mph.

No Mars rover photos, but the book does run to 2014, ending with the 67P/ChuryumovG­erasimenko, the first comet to be landed on by a spacecraft (Rosetta, launched in 2004).

With technology that can reach places and see phenomena that are otherwise invisible to the human eye, Nataraj writes, “we will continue to change the way we view our Earth, our universe, and our reality.”

?? Photograph­s from NASA/Chronicle Books ?? ASTRONAUT KOICHI WAKATA shot and tweeted this panorama of a crescent moon from the Internatio­nal Space Station in 2014.
Photograph­s from NASA/Chronicle Books ASTRONAUT KOICHI WAKATA shot and tweeted this panorama of a crescent moon from the Internatio­nal Space Station in 2014.
?? ?? EUROPA, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, as seen by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late ’90s.
EUROPA, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, as seen by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late ’90s.
?? ?? VOYAGER 1 EXPLORATOR­Y SPACECRAFT sent back an image in 1979 of Jupiter’s swirling clouds, moving at 400 mph, as part of an enduring high-pressure storm.
VOYAGER 1 EXPLORATOR­Y SPACECRAFT sent back an image in 1979 of Jupiter’s swirling clouds, moving at 400 mph, as part of an enduring high-pressure storm.
?? ?? SPECIAL imaging process allows for this view of the sun’s corona.
SPECIAL imaging process allows for this view of the sun’s corona.
?? ?? SPITZER Space Telescope found comet dust 695 light years away.
SPITZER Space Telescope found comet dust 695 light years away.

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