As Timothy Peake continues his trip into space and the International Space Station, the Natural History Museum will be presenting a display of photographs which will take visitors on a journey through space from the 22nd January.
The 77 composite images on display are a representation of the joining of art and science together. In order to create this exhibition, artist and writer Michael Benson has put together data from NASA and ESA missions to assemble the images that will be on display in this exhibition.
In order to give additional context to the images, museum researchers have partnered with Benson to give additional scientific information to the photographs. Audio commentary offers visitors isights into the work of the museum’s scientists such as Dr Joe Michalski, who is investigating the geological processes that shaped Mars to better understand the early life of our own planet.
Some of the highlights to expect in the exhibition include: A Plutonian haze which in a world-first, a colourised image of Pluto Pluto will be on public display and reveals the mysteries of our System’s best known dwarf planet. Also on display will be Enceladus vents water into space, taken in 2009 NASA’s Cassini mission captured images of Saturn’s sixth largest moon Enceladus spraying water into space from its southern polar region.
Michael Benson said: “In the past 60 years, an audacious, utterly consequential story has unfolded. Combining rocket science with the innate human drive to explore, after millennia of speculation about the planets, the first expeditions to the solar system’s far-flung worlds have taken place.”
Sir Michael Dixon, Director of the Natural History Museum commented: “These images reframe how we see our Solar System, created from the very same data that Museum scientists use to understand the 4.5 billion year history of our planet and life on it.”
Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System opens at the Natural History Museum from the 22nd January until the 15th May 2016.