Captivating space images show how it has inspired us through the ages

Thames & Hudson

It is a testament to the human imagination that the emptiest and most desolate place we know of – outer space – has inspired such obsession. In his upcoming book, Space Journal: Art, science and cosmic exploration, presenter and author Dallas Campbell gathers together iconic images associated with space, along with its more interesting marginalia.

Some of the most captivating imagery in Space Journal comes from when our knowledge of space, and its possible inhabitants, was scant, and fanciful imaginings filled in the gaps instead, like this Belgian cover of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds from 1906, below – complete with marauding tripod.

But astronomers soon got to work improving this knowledge. In around 1897, this would have been through objects like the basic but groundbreaking (at the time) telescope funded by businessman Percival Lowell, shown below.

More recently, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope stepped in. Its complex star shade required an intricate origami-style folding to package it for launch (a prototype is shown in the main image).

Campbell was born just after NASA’s Apollo missions changed our view of the moon and space forever, but it clearly left an imprint in his mind, just as astronauts left imprints on the moon, below.

“On Earth, footprints can fossilise in rock or wash away in hours. Here they will last for aeons, despite being formed in the finest of materials,” Campbell writes. “The Sea of Tranquility has no tide to erase them. These are imprints that mark a moment when we migrated from our home planet to another.”

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