Bonestell’s paintings have the feel futuristic versions of New Deal–era posters of America’s National Parks, with sweeping vistas and craggy rock formations. The space race was heating up, and the time saw a boom in “space art.” In her book Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and the Final Frontier, University of Miami historian Catherine Newell traces the work of Chesley Bonestell, a godfather of modern space art, back to the longer tradition of swoon-worthy-but-relatively-accurate landscape art. It was the heyday of black-light galleries in planetariums across America. “I wanted to have my own black-light hall in my room at home.” “I lusted after getting a black light, but mainly I was interested in astronomy,” he says. The young Emmart found himself especially mesmerized by the lyrical mural of the Horsehead Nebula, which sits on the belt of the constellation Orion. A space nerd since a toddler-age trip to the futuristic 1964 World’s Fair, Emmart began taking classes at the planetarium at age 10, by which time rock bands and poster-makers had embraced the black-light aesthetic, leading to its long association with psychedelics. The Hayden’s black-light gallery debuted in the ’50s, “before the hippies figured out they had something to get stoned to,” says Carter Emmart, now the museum’s director of astrovisualization. Guerry, told the magazine that the fluorescent-paint technique was “like painting with fire.” At the Abrams Planetarium in Michigan, the black light gallery is still going strong. They depicted, among other things, Mars, Saturn, the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, the Horsehead Nebula, and a solar eclipse, Sky and Telescope reported in May 1953.
Long before scientists could use reams of data to digitally reconstruct planetary surfaces or send someone virtually soaring through a distant constellation, these paintings were mainly based on photographs, drawings, and written reports. These lights near the mural would be designed to sweep across the image, making the aurora shimmy, quiver, and astound.Īlong with his team, Voter, an artist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was finalizing 14 astronomical murals for the first floor of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium. The particular paint he was using contained ingredients that would fluoresce under ultraviolet light, also known as black light. One day in the 1950s, Thomas Voter pulled a mask over his nose and mouth, reached for an airbrush, and attempted to make the aurora borealis dance across a darkened sky.
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