Space Portal
Like stars in the night sky, this exhibition is filled with many images or films that have a deep background in science, arts, and the personal experiences of each of the artists. We have put together a Space Portal where we share much more information, images, videos and open up new activities for everyone, including kids.
☀️ The Aesthetics: Step into space through the eyes of the artists.
🌛 The Science: Travel through facts and discoveries about space.
⭐️ The Adventure: Grab an activity sheet at the ticket desk, explore the exhibition, and take home a little surprise at the end.
#1 DARYA KAWA
Lunar XV
🌛 How to photograph a super clear moon?
By attaching his camera to a telescope and tracking the Moon over several nights, Darya Kawa gathers tens of thousands of exposures—sometimes over 80,000 for a single photo. These images are digitally aligned and “stacked,” a method that averages the consistent lunar surface signal while reducing random visual noise.
This process dramatically sharpens the image, revealing fine details like crater edges, ridges, and mineral patterns.To keep the Moon perfectly framed, Kawa uses a motorized equatorial mount that rotates in sync with Earth’s axis. This ensures that the Moon remains centered during long observation sessions, enabling precise stacking. In some of his most advanced images, he merges photos from different lunar phases, allowing sunlight from various angles to illuminate shadowed regions. This “phase mosaic” reveals more topography than any single phase could show.
Kawa’s color processing is also grounded in lunar science. By adjusting white balance and applying filters, he enhances subtle color differences caused by the Moon’s mineral composition—such as titanium-rich basalts that appear blue, and feldspar-rich highlands that reflect white or orange hues. These colors correspond to real geological features confirmed by NASA.His photos of rare events like “super blue moons”—a full Moon at its closest point to Earth and the second full moon of the month—further demonstrate how data volume and technique combine to yield clearer, brighter results.
#2 CECILIA ÖMALM & GÖRAN ÖSTLIN
Ad Lucem
🌛 Cyanotype: photography without a camera
The technique they use—cyanotype—was invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel, the English polymath who was at once an astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer. Some say that if he had pursued it further, he might have invented photography even before Louis Daguerre. Cyanotype is, at its heart, drawing with sunlight. Using light and simple chemicals, it produces deep blue images without a camera. Much cheaper than Daguerre’s silver process, it later became widely used in architecture as the “blueprint.” It was Herschel himself who gave us the word “photography,” meaning “drawing with light.”
Original glass plates were used to make such cyanotype prints, and among them the oldest one is used for the Venus transit, depicting the observation in 1882 in the Patagonia region in South America. We do not know who made the observation, but their handprint remains on the plate, fixed forever on the rare moment when Venus passed between Earth and the Sun—a phenomenon that only occurs every hundred years or so.
Another remarkable print is the Crab Nebula. This tangled cloud of light is the remnant of a supernova explosion. According to Edwin Hubble’s calculations in 1928, it took about 900 years to expand into its current form. That date aligns perfectly with a “guest star” recorded by Chinese astronomers of the Song Dynasty in the year 1054. This makes the Crab Nebula the first astronomical object identified with a historically observed supernova.
And among the most moving works is one of the oldest surviving photographs: an image of William Herschel’s telescope, captured by his son John before the instrument was dismantled. Now reborn as a cyanotype—John’s own invention—the image feels doubly significant, as if it was meant to endure in blue.