Journey Across the Stars
For my Star Trails series, I wanted to show the Webb telescope’s journey across the stars and constellations. The Polar Star Trails and Mirror drawings show the stars circumnavigating the celestial north pole. Using an imaginary camera, I created a time-lapse image of the stars traveling an arc of 90 degrees in the northern sky. But when I realized that the telescope would be located behind me in the southern sky, I solved the problem by holding up an imaginary mirror in front of the camera, enabling me to capture both the polar stars and the southern sky, including the JWST. The image can be hard to read because of the many star trails, but on close inspection, you can make out several notable stars, constellations and the Webb telescope traversing the sky.
“360° Star Trails at the Equator” is from an imaginary trip to a mountain top at the equator, where I pointed my imaginary camera directly upward to record how the stars and JWST travel in an apparent straight line. Toward the periphery of the drawing (the poles), the straight lines give way to elliptical lines.
For my Orbital Path drawings, I wondered what the telescope’s journey would look like over the course of a year or so. Using my same imaginary telescope and camera, along with NASA’s data, I took an imaginary photo every night at midnight from my backyard pointing south. I then plotted JWST’s path to produce the looping shape that describes its journey across the sky.
The backgrounds of the drawings consist of a sinusoidal rake of the distant stars as they would appear, smeared across the sky during a year-long camera exposure. The results were these unique sculptural shapes.
