This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
What if you could stand in a hallway in a huge building in New York City and feel as if you’re in the center of the universe?
Well, you can. “Eyes on the Universe: Images from Space Telescopes,” at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, is a jewel box exhibition of 14 photographs of supernovas, planets, galaxies and other astrophysical objects captured by three telescopes operating in space. It opened earlier this year and will run indefinitely.
It couldn’t be more timely. When two NASA astronauts splashed down in March after unexpectedly spending nine months — instead of one week — on the International Space Station, the public was transfixed.
And with the growth of private space companies, space tourism might be within reach, at least for the ultrawealthy.
The introductory photograph just outside the exhibition — more than five feet across —- shows a visualization of data from the Milky Way galaxy that looks something like a wispy outline of a mountain range illuminated in the dark. It was taken by the Gaia telescope, which was launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency and completed its mission in March.
What’s almost impossible to comprehend is what this image represents: Gaia’s efforts to measure every individual star — its position, its velocity and its brightness — in our galaxy, the Milky Way, said Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a co-curator of the show. So far, he added, the Gaia has surveyed about one percent of all the stars in the galaxy or about a billion stars.
While there are dozens of space telescopes, the curators chose to use images transmitted by three of the major ones — the Gaia, the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope
They went through hundreds of images publicly available through NASA, and the European Space Agency, focusing on those that met at least one of three criteria: they offer varied examples of human understanding of the universe, look good in the small hallway area, and have some connection to the museum’s own space research.
Their research, Dr. Mac Low said, at the broadest level, is about “trying to understand how the sun and earth came to be by studying how stars form, how galaxies form, how the first stars start to generate heavy elements. The iron in our blood comes from supernova — exploding stars. The hydrogen in the water came from the Big Bang. How did it get onto a planet, into us?”
On a much more specific — and relatable — level, astrophysics helped lead to the 19th-century discovery that atoms emit different colors, which led to quantum mechanics, which led to an understanding of semiconductors.
“And that phone in my pocket is completely dependent on extremely careful investigations of semiconductors,” he said.
A mural-like image on the doorway shows a giant pinkish and blue spiral against black with a bright yellow light in the middle of the spiral. Stars in the center are billions of years old, while those on the outer part of the spiral are young — only millions of years old.
Viewers can use a QR code to view a model of how this galaxy formed.
Other photographs include some 300,000 clusters of brilliantly sparkling stars in the Milky Way; another that looks like a blue planet drifting in space, but is actually a giant bubble of gas and dust that measures seven light years across.
The exhibition also highlights how each telescope transmits images differently. For example, two photographs of what is called a barred spiral galaxy are positioned one above the other. The top image, from the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, uses visible light and shows what looks like a circle of fire. The one below, of the same galaxy, taken by the James Webb Telescope, launched in 2021, uses primarily infrared. It appears to be a swirl of light.
Hot stars emit visible light, while the cold dust in space emits infrared light, thus the difference in appearance.
The three telescopes send different images for a variety of reasons — where they are, what they are designed to photograph and how powerful they are. The Hubble is in low orbit — about 300 miles above Earth. The Gaia was and the James Webb still is orbiting beyond the moon, at a point where the moon and earth’s gravity is about equal — about a million miles from earth.
The Gaia telescope was constantly spinning in an effort to map the whole sky, Dr. Mac Low said, whereas the Hubble and James Webb are pointed telescopes that capture pinpoints in the universe. The colors of all the images are enhanced; the astronomer processing the image uses something akin to an Instagram filter “for some combination of scientific value and aesthetics, he said.
His hope is that the exhibit will remind at least some who walk by that “the universe is a very big place and maybe get them to look up a little from their own focus.”
