To Starry Nights

We are bounded in a nutshell of Infinite Space: Week 9: Free Form #11: To Starry Nights

Astronomy could now be the pursuit of astronomers, astrophysicists, men and women of science who attempt to understand the mechanics of stellar movement and the ways the skies change and evolve. This has been true for centuries if not millennia, with figures as old as Galileo Galilei and Hipparchus, each contributing to the understanding of the heavenly spheres. However, there was another group, just as important, who considered the effect the stars and their image had on the imagination of the humans who stared at them every night. These are the artists, the interpreters of the intersection of reality and imagination, the surreal and real, the bit of the human spirit which refuses to yield to the oppressiveness of life and the continuous struggles it contains, all framed by canvas and substances which originated in dying stars eons ago. The clearest example of an artist impassioned by the heavens is Vincent Van Gogh, the creator of Starry Night

and Starry Night Over the Rhone.

Van Gogh is but one example of how the stars have influenced humanity’s creativity and the development of our culture. Beyond the present conceptions of nuclear reactors, stars were light, sources of divine inspiration as it were, a fundamental part of how humans have developed, looking up at the worlds beyond our understanding, to then attribute myths, tales, origin stories, and a range of ideas all attempting to connect us with the horizon of our imagination.  We spent millennia seeing the stars, wondering whether they were the evidence of our creation, the source of protection (as Van Gogh would paint in Starry Night), or the source of all we know and treasure. Little did we know then that, in fact, all we see around us had its origin 13.68 billion years ago, all from the same place, all form the first stars till the first galaxies to now the dot we reside on. 

References:

http://uploads3.wikiart.org/images/vincent-van-gogh/the-starry-night-1889(1).jpg!Large.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Starry_Night_Over_the_Rhone.jpg