Selected memories: The lonely hunter

Wiltshire, South-western England
January 2015

Long before the exploration of space, man held that the heavens were the province of powerful gods who mastered not only the cosmos, but our earthly fate. We believed that the pantheon of benevolent and warring deities was our past and our future and whose imprints were the great monuments created on Earth and in heavens. In time, we replaced these gods with new gods and with new gods came new religions, yet provided no better answers than those worshipped by our Greek and Roman ancestors. Now that we have reined in our imagination and found answers in the hard disciplines of science, we look to the skies with new eyes, apertures that open up the ever changing Universe, right before us.

January 2015: Northern Hemisphere winter is an auspicious time to meet Orion. Situated some 1,300 light years away, the Orion Nebula, also known as Messier 42 or M42, becomes plain to sight through the eye-piece of my telescope and DSLR attached onto it. Surprisingly, for the distance involved it is discernible with the naked eye, even in light-polluted regions.

In Greek Mythology, Orion was a hunter who fell out of gods’ favour and paid with his life: a giant scorpion stung him to death and followed him to his resting place, the heavens, but the two were placed diametrically opposite. When the constellation Scorpius rises in the sky, Orion sets below the western horizon, trying to flee from him. Right now, Orion has another few weeks’ grace and rises. And I am here to meet him once again. Another winter has gone by, another frigid night has ridden me and transported me to the beige worlds beyond. Jupiter and Saturn are in the offing, so this unprocessed image is my au revoir to the hunter, for now. I am sure he will keep evading the scorpion, but I will still keep an eye on him. Rumour has it that in space no one can hear you scream.
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