These are images composited from public research archives. They belong to the Digitized Sky Survey, a massive film-scanning project dedicated to making available astronomy data detailing the entire night sky. As I went down that rabbit hole I found things which didn’t seem to belong - Errors of one form or another. In some cases it’s obvious - solar flare reflecting the shape of the image-making instruments in the image itself - and in other cases, cause for speculation - is it a satellite passing by on the blue plate? A scratch on the red plate? Hard to say… but I found the experience very humbling. A reminder that for all we think we know, all of it is a reflection on who and what we are, as a species and as a culture. When we look out into the sky, through these massive machines, we are seeing ourselves and the products of our technology moreso than the universe at large.
