Voyagers Beyond: Imagining New Worlds at the Edge of Deep Space

Beyond the Heliopause comprises images based on the search for the possibility of another habitable planet that may one day have to sustain our populous species. These images are imagined observations of interstellar space, from the vantage points of the spaceprobes, Voyager 1 and 2, as they breach the Heliopause – the boundary between our Solar System and the beginning of deep space.

In August of 2012, the Voyager project team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced their anticipation of this milestone, and further discovery of celestial bodies that may as yet reveal themselves to the spaceprobes, within this region of space. Upon revisiting the images taken by the Voyager spaceprobes, it was the very first image from Voyager 2 that captivated my curiosity of the unknown. Photographed at 7.5 million miles from the Earth, the image of the Earth and the Moon in orbit had been artificially manipulated in order to match the difference in brightness between the two celestial bodies, but maintained its intrigue and fascination of the then unseen Blue Planet, that we still call our home. This image also left me contemplating on how often the processes of space research and exploration produce results that overlap certain areas of science and art, transforming what we may see as blinking dots in the night sky, into exciting, chaotic and forbidding worlds.

As I continued work on this series, my mind reflected on Voyager 1 making its way out of the Sun’s reach at an estimated 10.5 miles per second. It would be the first of its kind to take the plunge into deep space, and along with it, the hope and desire in every human being that has resulted from a curiosity of the unknown. Through photographic means, my expressions of hope and desire to learn of distant worlds has also been realized, but is limited to these resulting images which I offer to the viewer as a terminus a quo of making the invisible, visible.