a space-scape made of concentrated awesome

Here's a little something for fans of large, complex space art...

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I do my best to hunt down great illustrations to help set the mood for my posts. Just like any subjective editorial venture, it can be a very time consuming process and sometimes it takes hours to find the right image, but I think the results are definitely worth the effort. Now, over the last twenty two months, I've seen countless space-scapes across the web, so as you might imagine, it's very difficult to really impress me in that department. However, a link I found while browsing Reddit didn't just impress me, but pointed me to what must be one of the most amazing artistic renditions of the our solar system ever to grace my monitor. Here's a little sneak peek at this immense, 30,000 by 1,000 pixel image…

Just think about it for a second. This isn't just an artist's conception of a distant solar system somewhere well beyond our reach. This is a picture of home, a place we're actively exploring right now, a place that we should all want to see with our own eyes if we ever get the chance. All these worlds are in our reach in the immediate future and the often fuzzy and heavily processed pictures, or relatively inexpensive CG renders we usually get to see on TV or in news articles on the web don't really do these worlds justice. And this is why I love masterful and richly detailed images like this. They can kick start your imagination and inspire an interest in the amazing things right beyond our backyards, and hopefully, an interest in how to get to them, explore them, and possibly even live there one day. And if you can survive in deep space, you can truly survive anywhere.