DAY 218

PHOTOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES

Photographing the Past

LOOKING TO THE STARS AND SEEING HISTORY

In Michael Crichton’s novel Sphere, an American space shuttle from the future enters a time warp through a black hole, crash-landing on Earth 300 years in the past. The series of Planet of the Apes films dealt with a similar theme—a crew of astronauts travels into the distant future.

There is a certain appeal to the idea of transcending the boundaries of our own lifetime by witnessing other time periods. And, while time travel is not likely to become a reality any time soon, space photography provides us with a chance to literally watch the past as it happens.

Given the vast expanse of the universe, the light from other heavenly bodies does not reach us instantaneously. (Even the light from the Sun is 8 minutes old by the time it reaches Earth.) The closest star system to ours, Alpha Centauri, is 4.36 light years away, meaning that whatever we see from this system actually happened more than four years ago. Most intriguing are some of the more recent photographs of deep space, capturing supernovas and star births that took place 13 billion years ago—around the beginning of the known universe. —DJS