Eating the Stars: The Iconic Path of Eta Carinae and its Homunculus Nebula

This visual essay is an experiment based on the life of astronomical images. It revolves around the notion of the ‘iconic path’ and discusses the way celestial light transmutes into different visual representations, thus acquiring new meanings, shapes and functions. This exceptional journey departs from the light of the Eta Carinae star and its Homunculus Nebula and ends up in our stomach. The essay is based upon the idea that pictures do not simply ‘illustrate’ the external world, but are the actual materials used to produce arguments about outer space. The familiarity of celestial objects depends enormously on how the astronomical data (i.e. the light received by technological artifacts) is translated into forms that are familiar to human vision and cognition. In short, we mainly know the universe as an image. We would like to take you on a journey to see how the Eta Carinae star and its Homunculus Nebula migrate from one picture to another. Each visual form that we discuss is situated within what we call ‘a territory’. In this text, we distinguish between scientific territories, artistic territories, consumption territories, public dissemination territories and even ‘bodily territories’ where our stomach belongs. The iconic path of the images of Eta Carinae and its Homunculus Nebula starts in the scientific territories, continues in the artistic and public ones, and finishes in our body. The reason for establishing this iconic path within the territories of science and aesthetics is that ‘Astronomical images exist at an intersection of science and art, of information and aesthetics, of the contextual and the visual’ (Smith et al., 2015, ‘Is that real? Understanding astronomical images’, in Journal of Media and Communication Studies 7[5]: 89). Finally, the iconic path proposed in this work is amalgamated to form the constellation of pictures as a final destination of this iconic path.