Solar System Art Gallery

[loud fire and engine sounds]
NASA narrator: And here we go.
10 hydrogen burnoff igniters initiated.
7, 6, 5, 4 stage engine start, 3, 2, 1, boosters, ignition, and lift off of Artemis one.
Jessie: Whoa.
NASA narrator: We rise together back to the moon and beyond.
Jessie: Oh Wow.
Justin: It's pretty cool, right?
Jessie: That is so cool. And you were there in person.
Justin: Well, my cousin worked on the Artemis one launch. I plan on working with NASA one day though.
Jessie: Oh, that's awesome.
Justin: Facts.
Jessie: It is such a cool time to be alive right now. I mean, we've been looking up at the stars for centuries, but we now live in this time where we can actually send people to the moon and robots even farther.
Justin: It makes me wonder about the past and what people thought about outer space. I mean, they didn't have the same technologies that we have nowadays.
Jessie: Yeah. Well I know they would draw and paint what they saw, so I bet we could find some art in the galleries.
Justin: We should go look.
Jessie: Oh, we should look,
[upbeat music]
Jessie: Here's a solar eclipse from the 1570s that's over 450 years ago.
Justin: It's like the solar eclipse that we had back in 2024.
Jessie: Oh yeah, in April. That's cool. I can see they're both glowing. This orange-ish red.
Justin: Yeah, because our solar system is set up like a huge dinner plate.
Jessie: Huh.
Justin: The sun is right in the middle. All the planets including the earth circling around it. Our moon circles around us while we circle around the sun. Sometimes the moon lines up against the sun blocking out the light. It happens pretty rarely though.
Jessie: It's pretty cool though, that we can track patterns so far into the future.
Justin: Yeah. My cousin says that historians use patterns to help us understand the past. I don't understand how though.
Jessie: Oh, my friend Larisa could help with that. She studies history by looking at old books.
Justin: Would you like to go talk to her?
Jessie: Let's go.
Justin: Alright, let's go.
Jessie: Hi, Larisa.
Dr. Larisa Grollemond: Hey Jessie. How are you?
Jessie: Good. This is my friend Justin.
Larisa: Hey Justin.
Jessie: Thank you for meeting with us. We were wondering what people in the past thought about the sun and the stars and other things in outer space.
Larisa: It's such a good question. And astronomy has such a long history. Cultures all over the world were looking at the sky and making art about it. So this is one medieval manuscript that shows one culture’s understanding of the sky and astronomy.
Jessie: Cool.
[inspirational music]
Whoa. This book is old.
Larisa: This book is very old. So we know that it was made around 1464 in medieval Germany. And the main text of the manuscript starts with a series of images that look like this.
Jessie: Oh wow. It's a lady in a green dress, but what does that have to do with the stars?
Larisa: So this lady in the green dress represents the moon. And you can tell because there's a little moon here in the corner. And if we keep going and to look at the other images, there's this guy who's red
Justin: Mars?
Jessie: Oh, like the red planet?
Larisa: Mm-Hmm.
Justin: I've always had an interest in medieval scientists. Didn't they use the stars for like calendars?
Larisa: That's exactly right. So this manuscript actually has diagrams for each day of the week. So we have the first day of the week Sunday,
Jessie: Like the day of the sun.
Larisa: Exactly right. So this begins, uh, with an image of the sun at the center. And if we keep going to the next day, we have
Justin: Wait moon's day
Larisa: Monday or moon day. So a moon at the center of the diagram. So this manuscript has timekeeping devices for both the days of the week and a whole year.
Jessie: It's really interesting because we still use things like the days of the week. Is there anything else where they observed things that we still look at today?
Larisa: There is. So in addition to observing the movement of the stars, this medieval artist was also observing comets.
Justin: Wait comets? Like the huge chunks of ice and dust. Right?
Larisa: That's exactly right. So this series of comets is given names based on how they would've appeared to someone on earth. So here's Veru. And you can see here that it has a little green stripe in this rainbow.
Jessie: So if you were on earth and you saw this comet, the comet would look green.
Larisa: That's right. And so the other comets also have these Latin names based on their color. So here is rosa for
Jessie: Oh, like pink.
Larisa: Pink or red. And this is shown as a lion with a little pink tongue out. Scientists and astronomers were not only observing the way that comets looked, but also their behavior. So we know that comets come around the earth at pretty regular intervals.
Justin: Kind of like Hailey's comet, which comes around every 76 years.
Jessie: So if it came around, it wouldn't be here again until 2062
Jessie and Justin: We should throw a party!
Jessie: You know, it's so interesting to me that these medieval astronomers were observing the same things back then that we can still observe today.
Larisa: This is a different way of understanding and it's beautiful art. I mean, this is essentially the medieval equivalent of the James Webb telescope.
Justin: Wow, That's interesting. I have an idea. We should observe something.
Larisa: Did you have something in mind?
Justin: Did I, it's eclipse time.
[crescendoing music]
Jessie, Larisa, and Justin: Whoa!