Ponder the creative violence of the cosmos.
while we wait for the networks to start calling states, I’m trying to zoom out, to remind myself that there is a cosmos beyond Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This is not too difficult, once you work up the necessary resolve. Whatever cruelties plague our current historical era (and there are many), we do have cameras that can see across the universe, and anyone with a decent internet connection can freely peruse the snapshots that they’ve taken. I keep the photo archive for the James Webb Space Telescope, the farthest-seeing of them all, in my bookmarks bar. When I find myself a bit too immersed in the political news cycle, I click through the latest releases.
The image at the top of this page was posted in late October, and for me, it was an instant favorite. I love its rendered colors—the shock pink, pale chartreuse, and lightsaber blue. I love the three-dimensionality, the way your eye is drawn through torn veils of orange and red in the foreground into a glowing inner sanctum. I love the distant galaxies scattered across the frame, their shapes and orientations, the mind-shredding thought that together they contain many trillions of planets.
I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to experience these images purely on this level, as beautiful splatters of light. Sometimes it’s nice to gawk at a dark and sparkling expanse without any talk of metallicity or ionized gas. But last week, I was in the mood to follow any stray curiosity, so long as it did not relate directly to the election. I wanted to know what was happening in this image.
To capture it, the Webb telescope was pointed beyond the Milky Way’s edge, at one of its satellites, the Small Magellanic Cloud.
