Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 – Suneel’s Review

National Maritime Museum

15.09.2024

Review by Dr. Suneel Mehmi

Hunger for the stars. Hunger to be the stars. They shine above. We below, stranded in our narrowness, separated from the skies.

Most lunchtimes at work I go down to the National Maritime to see the stars and the skies in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Exhibit. I have the name ‘Sun’ in my name. The star conveys my identity. The one of our low castes in the Mahabharata, the hero Karana, he was the son of the Sun god. The sun is me and us. And the sun belongs in the skies.

These photographs are going to be my friends for a year. New friends. The places that I travel to in the imagination. An introduction to my new friends.

11 of my Highlights:

1. Mission Espada

San Antonio, Texas, USA, 14 October 2023

People and Space 2024

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/people-space-2024

Mission Espada is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and this view of the annular solar eclipse was taken there. The photographer was worried that the clouds would cover the shot but they got the shot of the “Ring of Fire” – the bright ring-like appearance of the sun which is not obscured by the moon.

I loved the rolling, spiralling clouds in the sky which framed rather than obscured the shot. Without them, there would not be the drama.

The story of Mission Espada is that it was a site of colonisation: a place where they converted Native Americans to Christianity. Having the building in the shot below the skies perhaps puts colonisation into perspective: there is a larger reality beyond imperialism, between the forcing of others to become white.

And it is here that the white clouds become whiteness itself: something that the sun with his union in the female moon penetrates and overcomes. The Sun with his Other. Union over the strategy of divide and rule, union over white supremacism. The cloud of whiteness and white supremacism is division, obfuscation, coercion, duress, injustice. The Sun with his Moon is Love. They blaze above. They reign through Love.

2. Run to Carina

Kunene Region, Namibia, 15 September 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/people-space-2024

Nobody knows who has put these sculptures in Namibia. In this place of the mystery of art, the running man sculpture runs into the stars. The desire to run amidst the stars. The ultimate mission of humankind: to populate the stars. To bring life to the universe. The dream. The hope. To be a part of the universe.

The rocks of the ground contrast with the beauty of the lights in the skies. The humble matter that is the rocks and us. Us men of dirt. That aspire to the heavens. Ambition. The intrepid explorer. The desire to become better. What makes us human.

As the photographer contemplates the artwork, as photography contemplates art and her mystery, as the dreamer dreams, the eye of the mind awakens.

3. Like Blue Lava by Petr Horalek

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/skyscapes-2024

“I visited the northern beach of the small island of Medhufaru and couldn’t believe my eyes. The whole beach shone with engaging turquoise light, while the gems of the Southern Cross constellation – such as the Gum Nebula or Carina Nebula – appeared in the sky,” Petr recalls.

Water as the blue electric. Dazzling, mesmerising, scintillating. The energy of the water cascading in the folds of the eyes and the body. The unity of the sky with the water, spaces filled with light.

The photographer calls the water the blue lava. The eruption of the earth in synchronicity with the light of the heavens. The emergence from the deep underneath into vision and beauty. And this blue lava, he swims in it. The dream of the swimmer, to be immersed in this blue lava. The cold blue fire of eruption and light.

4. Cloud Parade

Gällivare, Norrbotten, Sápmi (formerly Lapland), Sweden, 17 December 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/skyscapes-2024

Polar stratospheric clouds (nacreous clouds). Achingly beautiful, drenched in colours. You look upon the beauty of the natural world and her patterns. Hoping for a beauty like that in your life.

We dream of the days of leisure when we can look up into the clouds and admire their beauty. We dream of the days when we have time for the moments of beauty in this life. We envy those who have the time for this beauty. For the beauty of the clouds. This fleeting beauty that, like love, does not stay anywhere, that never rests. That blows in the wind. And, puff. She is gone. They are gone. All is gone. The cloud disappears like youth, the one who turned away from us. That never even looked back.

5. Belogradchik Under the Stars

Belogradchik, Bulgaria, 1 May 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/skyscapes-2024

A beautiful panorama, a beautiful cinematic scene. Bringing back the memories of walking in the mountains in communion with nature, the mother and the goddess. Bringing to the viewer the closeness to the skies that comes with being in the mountains. The connection with the universe, when you touch the face of the mother.

The warmth of the orange, the invitation. The pleasure. The diagonal across the sky – the sublime power of the universe and of nature. The terrain: the welcome to exploration, to connect with the vastness of being.

6. Heaven is Remote

Deadvlei/Sossusvlei, Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia, 22 and 23 March 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/skyscapes-2024

The arc of the milky way in these magical dead trees. Spectacular, mystical, resonant, spiritual.

Death is meeting light. It is almost a regeneration. The movement from death into another plane of being, as in the mysticism of religion. The portal into another state.

The blueness of the scene like mourning, like depression, like grief.

A capture of death. As death becomes light.

The hope after death. A light filled place.

Which I do not believe in.

7. Aurora Borealis Over Brighton Seafront by Michael Steven Harris

Taken in Brighton, East Sussex, UK, 1 November 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/aurorae-2024

An amazing vision resplendent with neon lights. A vision which brings back beauty to the city, the beauty of the skies. The city where we shrink, where no one knows us, where we know no one. Where there are no connections and no light.

The three layers: water at the base, the city in the middle, the sky above. Each filled with beautiful colour and wonder, the wonder that you never really experience in the city when you are no longer young. The city as a dream of promise. The way you saw the city once. Once long ago.

8. Arctic Dragon

Raufarhöfn, Iceland, 25 February 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/aurorae-2024

Once, I went to Iceland. I was recovering from a long illness. It is a place of memory. A place of healing. A place of discovery, the rediscovery of the self.

The dragon, she is memory too. The memory of pain.

This photograph is like an artist’s vision. It looks like imaginative truth. But it is not imaginative truth. It is the truth of the lens. The truth of time and space. Perhaps a little processed. But the truth of the skies. An amazing sight, an amazing shot, an amazing conception. Perfect in every way. An example of the realness of photography as art. And the photographer as artist. An artist that paints with the palette of the real.

9. The Palette Of The Himalayas

Shigatse City, Xizang Province, China, 24 January 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/our-sun-2024

Where the sun and the altostratus clouds act together to create a huge corona soaring above the roof of the world.

The multicoloured spectrum that is the splendour and power of the sun, the one that I identify with. In the Himalayas, the mountains where the land meets the sky, in Asia where my parents come from.

Light and colour. Colour and light. Floating in magnificence in the blue boat of the sky.

10. Crescent by Jinyuan Chen

Taken in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, 16 October 2023

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/our-moon-2024

The moon is beauty in Indian culture. If a woman is beautiful, we say that she is a fragment of the moon. The moon herself is a beautiful woman.

And here, we have the beauty of the Chinese conception. The moon floating in the mists of the clouds, like a Chinese ink brush painting in greyscale. Poetic, evocative. Resonant with the mystery of the moon and the mystery of nature. The mystery of women, the mystery that men seek to uncover. We spend our lives in the attempt to discover the moon, to discover the woman. Are we ever successful?

11. Anatomy of a Habitable Planet by Sergio Díaz Ruiz

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/image-innovation-prize-2024

“This seemingly alien world is actually our endangered planet, Earth, as a distant civilization might study it,” explains Sergio.

“This image was created by mixing the 16 bands monitored by the GOES-18 weather satellite to encode landmasses, oceans and atmospheric features as different colours.”

At the end of the exhibition, there is this reminder, this distorted view of the earth, our home, our mother. Our mother is in trouble. She needs our protection. There is no Planet B.

For a moment, we dwell amongst the stars. For the rest of a lifetime, we dwell upon the earth.

There is an Indian song in the Hindi film ‘Flying Jatt’, where the Sikh flies in the skies, like I fly in the skies in the National Maritime Museum. A film about protecting Mother Earth and the environment. The Sikh only bows his head for three places:

Ek maa ke charno mein – One in the feet of his mother

Ek mitti ki shaan mein – One in the splendour of (his) earth

Ek rabb ji di dvaari – One in the court of God.

….

The Museum website where you can see all the images:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/exhibition

…

Suneel’s Visual Diary Today

The Kew Gardens Archive Brought to Life: The SS Great Britain Wardian Cases Exhibition at the RHS Flower Show at Hampton Court

11.07.2024
Dr. Suneel Mehmi

There were many unique characteristics of the RHS Flower Show at Hampton Court which I observed as a novice to the event. The variety of our relationships to plants and flowers in art, culture and food. The friendliness of the people there. The almost overwhelming enthusiasm. One such characteristic was that they had plant porters and also that many of the public that did without the plant porters were struggling with the structures of the plants as they flowed within the spaces. The plant structures – so beautiful to behold and so suitable to evolution and adaptation – seemed particularly unwieldy and cumbersome, and their fragility in transit was worrying. I was particularly surprised that at the very start of the morning, people were buying the plants so that they had to carry them around for the whole event, although I suppose that was so that they could get their first choice.

It was in this context that I came across the SS Great Britain Wardian Cases Exhibition. I had already seen the Wardian case at Kew Gardens for our volunteer training there, so it was not an unfamiliar sight, and I even knew some of the history behind this construction. The Wardian case is what I would describe as a life box that protects plants in a microclimate where they only need to be watered once during a two-month crossing.

Something akin to a miniature Victorian glasshouse, although made out of wood, the Wardian case has been described as a revolution in the long distance transportation of plants. Patently, the construction was where the sciences of botany and biology found their sanctuary and spring as the living plants could be studied in Europe rather than grown from seeds in a foreign land. Again, the case allowed the transportation of economically important plants and is thus one of the most significant relics in the history of modern capitalism and global development. One of the most noteworthy connections with Kew gardens is with the exportation of seedlings from our glasshouses to Ceylon and Malaya in the 1870s to begin the rubber plantations. However, Kew Gardens also habitually used Wardian cases to transport plants until 1962.

The display at the RHS Flower show was a preview of the exhibition at the SS Great Britain which is Bristol’s number one visitor attraction. On the ship’s weather deck, six reconstructed Wardian cases are on display for visitors to explore. Each is a replica of the last surviving ship-board example designs which are to be found in the Kew Gardens archive. Based on research from the Brunel Institute, studies of the ship’s cargo manifests, each case is planted with a true-to-life ‘order’. The cases will celebrate the inbound and outbound plant species that the ship transported across the world between 1859 and 1875. The exhibition highlights the role of steamships in the transportation of plants and the making of the modern world.

Along with the exhibition of the Wardian cases, there is other horticultural interest. There is a botany-themed ‘discovery talk’ and horticultural workshops. A ‘botanist’s cabin’ has also been added to the ship’s museum in which you are to become immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of life onboard – a lived experience and introduction to the important work and research of Victorian botanists and ‘plant hunters’.

The exhibition at the RHS Flower Show was an exciting and stimulating moment in time travel to a monumental period in the history of plants and in the makings of a globalised world. Looking at those fairly small boxes with such a colossal impact was a message that just a little thought and a few materials can change reality. The resourcefulness and ingenuity of the human mind can reshape everything. As we try to combat the mass extinction event that is threatening all plant life and diversity, the Wardian case stands as a symbol that improvement can be wrought to transform botany, biology, the life sciences – and the future. And the Wardian case is also a symbol of connection across the world through transport. The future is about more connection across cultures through science and study enabled through constructions like the Wardian case. And more connections with Kew Gardens, its science and its archives and knowledge to inspire the understanding of this living planet and the foundations on which it has been built.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to the SS Great Britain for allowing me to share the photographs and especially to Emily France there who was so helpful with the research and the permissions.

Suneel’s Favourites in Astronomy Photographer of the Year – National Maritime Museum

05.01.2024

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/exhibition

Since I work in the area, it is quite convenient for me to see the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition during my lunch breaks. So I often go down to see it. I love looking into the sky of stars and look at the universe which envelops us, the larger world that gives us perspective and power. Because we are all part of something larger. We are the consciousness of the universe, if it has one. We are its only known intelligent life forms. And she is our mother.

This is a universe that has been taken away from us through the narrow mindedness of the world, through light pollution, urbanisation and industrialisation. That view of the skies which was us for thousands of years and millions of years when we were not yet quite human has been taken away from us by Them. This exhibition gives us back our continuous inheritance. That is why it is important to me and why I love it.

Here are some of my favourite images from the exhibit and why:

Filip Hrebenda ‘Green Snakes’

A photograph of green aurorae, the coloured lights in the sky. Amongst reflections of water and and stark black lava-esque mountains and ridges. Green is one of my favourite colours and you can see the hazy greens here melting into the skies. The leading lines of the reflecting water lead the eye towards the peak of the mountain, giving an effect of the sublime – overwhelming power that engulfs us. It is a truly awesome and epic shot which leaves us in awe at the beauty and the mystery of nature.

Peter Hoszang ‘The Green Glow’

The same subject as before – the coloured lights in the sky and the mountains. This one has less of a warm feel because there are more blues. And there is also ice in the waters. It is a different vibe, but with the same sublime feeling, since the lights in the sky dwarf the snow-capped mountains.

Monika Deviat ‘Brushstroke’

The aurora – the coloured lights – again green, look more abstract here because they are only seen against the night sky and the stars. The aurora is divorced from the setting. The artist says it looks like a brush stroke. The image is effective because we concentrate on the lights without any distractions in the background. Simple and focused, isolated. The beauty of light, pure and simple.

Vincent Beudez ‘Butterfly’

Purple, white and green aurora in the shape of a butterfly. Amazingly poetic and beautiful. The word butterfly is associated through tradition with the ancient Greek word ‘psyche’, which means soul. Wouldn’t a soul – if such a thing existed – come in the form of a butterfly of light? Radiant, ravishing, roaring.

Katie McGuinness ‘Close Encounters of the Haslingden Kind’

A stunning view of Haslingden’s Halo – a panopticon sculpture – amidst the night sky. The shining structure pictured against the movements of the night sky through a time lapse capture really caught my imagination with the blue and the white hues. It was a moment where you realise that the future that they imagined, the technological future, has actually become a reality for us now. The technology, the art, the structures that we make, seem like something that has come almost from an alien intelligence that is years ahead of us in thought and technology. But it is us that did it. We are the alien intelligence.

Angel An ‘Grand Cosmic Fireworks’
Dancing, fluorescent lights above the Himalaya mountains (atmospheric luminescence made of plasma and electric discharge). What is there not to like? There is something like seaweed about the lights that are almost immersed in the clear water of the skies. It is a scene which I could never have imagined and this is what gives it its power. Things like this are happening beyond our eyes, our comprehension, our ken. They enlarge us when we see them.

Chunlin Liu ‘Autumn Milky Way Arc and an Orion Bolide’

There is something so exceptionally Chinese about this image of the Milky Way arc, something so emblematic of the art. The horizontality of the image for one thing, the delicacy of the skies that have been rendered, the mountain scene which we associate with Chinese ink brush drawings. Amazingly beautiful, delicate and wonderful. A loving homage to the perspective of a culture which has been fostered carefully through thousands of years of an art tradition.

Vikas Chander ‘The Dancing Trees of Sumba’

These mangrove trees are shaped in such a way that people call them the dancing trees. They look as though they are frozen in a dance posture. Against the beautiful sky reflecting in the water which is like a mirror, they are incredibly elegant, a reminder that nature thrives in the universe, it dances in the dance of creation.

Mehmet Ergun ‘The Great Solar Flare’

I think of myself as the Sun (my name is Sun-eel). This amazingly detailed, textured view of the sun and its awesome power is really an iconic image. So bold. The sun fills the frame, giving that air of dominance as the ruler of our galaxy.

Alex Savenok ‘C/2021 A1 (Leonard) in the Sky of Israel’

Above the Negev desert and its picturesque ridges, we see ‘a celestial visitor in the night sky’. The image looks like the covers of science fiction books. It doesn’t seem real. Yet this is our earth at night time, if only we had the opportunity to see it. A taste of what we have had to miss because of the industrialised world and urban living. A taste of what we have had to lose, that connection with the skies and the reality of this planet, this universe, our mother.

Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau ‘Crescent Moon in a Magical Sunset’

A beautiful crescent moon in an orange, yellow and white sky. A sense of the crescent swirling in the clouds, full of movement and dance.

James Baguley ‘The Dark Wolf – Fenrir’

A homage to Norse mythology – Fenrir the wolf caught in red (a molecular cloud surrounded by red hydrogen gas). A reminder of the phrase that ‘Nature is red in tooth and claw’ – a lesson to be learnt from a perusal of this image. If anyone knows the mythology of Fenrir – I used to read mythology books as a child and was obssessed with the myths – this picture would become pregnant with meaning. With the themes of fatherhood, destruction, trickery, imprisonment, the animality of the human…

Steeve Body ‘The Majestic Tarantula Nebula’
Runwei X and Binyu Wang ‘The Running Chicken Nebula’

Both of these are a ‘cosmic ballet’ in glorious and awe-inspiring colour. Showing that human made abstract art can’t rival the play of forces in the universe to create patterns in the universe on a colossal scale as works of art. Full of fire and life.

The Refugee Boat – Some Thoughts on an Alternative History of Transport

10.03.2022

If you go to a transport museum, the likelihood is that you will see ultra-expensive vehicles which were at the cutting edge of technology. These cars, buses, trains and trams would have had all the modern conveniences and would have been fairly safe, even if safety standards in the past were laxer. In terms of production, an entire army of workers would have been involved in the construction, probably an ‘international’ team (by which I mean white Europeans).

The history you would find in such museums would be progressive, a story of increasing rationality, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, capitalism, big business. A story the rich tell themselves to celebrate the world that they have created: the globalised, interlinked world of transport convenience. Where, theoretically, there are no physical barriers to community, commuting, connection.

Standing out in stark contrast to this ‘Whig’ version of history is the humble refugee boat.

The refugee boat is fairly inexpensive. It is the mode of transport of the poor, the desperately oppressed seeking a better life in the only way that they can given their losses in the lottery of life and birth. The refugee boat, while not the worst piece of technology ever invented, is still pretty primitive. The standard image is the unpretentious dinghy, clearly unfit for the purpose of a long journey by the sea in dangerous waters. Travel by sea is itself one of the longest, most inconvenient, inefficient and deadly forms of travel, where you are seemingly at the utmost mercy of nature. There are no modern conveniences. Hardly any water to drink, hardly any room for food. No toilet. There is no safety. There is probably more than a 50:50 chance of death. What about the production? The workers that made these products were probably exploited in sweatshops in economically less dominant countries around the globe.

The history of the refugee boat is the unadulterated, unpolished history of transport in our times. History is not always written by the victors. It is also written by the losers. The refugee boat is the testament to the fact that our modes of travel are not objectively the best. They are merely fit for the types of people and the societies that use them. The transport history in museums is the product of capitalism and the reign of the rich. The transport history of the undocumented migrants is the product of those that power has missed out, those that capitalism has downtrodden.

The unvarnished history of the refugee boat – which the media presents as a horrible throwback to primitive times, a history which is now culminating in government interception of such travellers and their lives being thrown away like trash somewhere else, as someone else’s problem – is the real history of travel beyond propaganda, advertisement, embellishment, cultural narcissism. This is the real story of the world that the ultra-rich have created: a world where you can’t even travel from one country to another to try and better your life. A world in which you are tied to the place you were born and the lack of opportunities there. Why can’t anyone tell this history?