After writing my recent post about The Edge of the Universe, I was thinking about one of my heroes, Edwin Hubble. He’s (kind of) responsible for two of my all-time favourite photographs.
Firstly, the lad himself. Hubble, looking every inch the gentleman scientist, pipe in mouth, looking through the 48″ Schmidt Telescope at Palomar Observatory, 1949. This photo feels to me like the past and the future colliding.
And then there’s this, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, produced by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s not exactly a photo, but an image put together from a lot of pieces of information. It was created from data gathered in 2003-04, but was released most recently in June 2014 – the new image including the full range of ultraviolet to near-infrared light for the first time. It’s as mind-bending as it’s possible for a picture to be. This is only a small area of space, and yet it contains about 10,000 galaxies. And the light from the galaxies stretches all the way back 13 billion years – some of these came into existence not that long after the Big Bang. The telescope was named after Hubble, and this image is an incredibly appropriate tribute to him, as the first man to realise that there were galaxies separate to our own and that what we thought was the whole universe was just our little Milky Way.
On a completely different vibe, here’s my favourite photo from my blog so far. A woman letting the darning fend for itself while she loses herself in a book – from The Mother’s Companion, 1891.
What is there to prevent a woman from enjoying a good book?
And finally there’s this photo of Buster Keaton’s beautiful face, taken from Go West in 1925. What a unique talent this man had. If you haven’t seen his film Sherlock, Jnr, I would recommend it very highly. It’s hilarious, astounding and a beautiful piece of work, and it’s also my joint favourite film ever, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Back to the photo – his eyeliner, dark silent-film lips, the unsettlingly sinister look giving a slightly different take on his usual stone-face expression….it’s just perfect. We did have this picture up in the kitchen until my small son complained that it “freaked him out”.
History, comedy, space and reading – I think these pics pretty much sum me up.
Tell me or show me yours! Or send me a link and I’ll put them in a new post for you.
