Baby Galaxy The Antennae galaxies NGC 4038 and 4039 have interacted successfully. © NGC 4038/4039 image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team. © Human embryo image: The Nobel Foundation.
Freeflight The young star LLOri sends charged particles into space: solar wind. Or is it the wing beat of an Ori Colubris? © LLOri image: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScl/AURA).
Spawn Billions of young galaxies are about to hatch © Images various galaxies and star clusters: NASA, ESA, M. Roberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA), Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Team, HHT (STScl/AURA). © image zooplankton: NOAA.
Danse Macabre The dance of stars in the Small Magelhanic Cloud © NGC 346 image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScl/AURA).
Lungs The universe breaths in and out. © Crab Nebula/M1 image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScl/AURA). Tree image from Pixabay.
X-ray Nebula A cluster of hot, young stars in the Orion Nebula. © Orion Nebula (section) image: NASA/JPL Caltech.
Saturn Wave The 7 rings of Saturn circle the planet, with 6 main wave periods between them. This is the 6th ring as it would appear straightened out. Top: full image (width 90 cm), below a cross section. © Saturn F ring image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute (Cassini Huygens Collection).
Impact Mars has thousands of impact craters. One meteorite seemed to have ended the life of a long extinct amphibean... © Mars surface image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. © Trilobite image: The Virtual Fossil Museum.
Shallow/Deep Space A ribbon of sandbanks between the shoreline of the Carina Nebula and deep space © Image Carina nebula (section): NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScl/AURA). @ Image Bahama sandbanks: NOAA, NASA.
About Organic Space
Space is all around us and inside us. You can see it when you look up at the night sky, or through a microscope. With a little bit of imagination we can even see forms and textures in the universe reflected in Nature, including our own bodies. Just look at Jupiter's moon Europa with its 'capillaries' and the iris-shaped Helix nebula. Not imagined but real, is that the universe made us. It produced Earth, and Earth produced us. We’re rich in carbon, like stars and planets. We are literally living space stuff. How beautifully mind blowing! Hail to all scientists painting the fundamental picture, layer by layer, ever sharper, making space bigger, more unified, stranger and closer at the same time. Just look at the images taken by research probes such as Cassini and space telescopes Hubble and James Webb. Peering into the cavities of space, capturing light bending around black holes, these instruments show us how far away yet familiar celestial bodies are. In my Organic Space series I'm exploring that notion by merging some of those pixel perfect space pictures with images of organic life.
Organic Space is also a tribute to everyone involved in observing, studying, mapping and exploring space. They’ve provided me with a big basket of very fruitful material to work with. I’ve stopped counting the hours I spend in the online image libraries of NASA, ESA and JPL Caltech. But that’s nothing compared to the endless hours scientists spend on cold mountains, behind computers and in laboratories, studying the night sky, analyzing data, constructing little exploration vehicles or waiting for a wow signal. Maybe one day they’ll hear the distant humming of an Ori Colubris...