UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how the practice of astronomical illustration changed and expanded over the course of the twentieth century Space Age. In the United States, the post-war period transformed outer space into a geopolitically significant environment, reorienting the authoritative picturing of space from a practice housed primarily within European astronomical observatories to one with commercial viability in American science and popular culture. In the absence of cameras capable of rendering the space environment, individual illustrators filled in pictorial gaps by hand. Between the years of 1944 and 1987, illustrators developed an aesthetic of neutrality that visually signaled the scientific accuracy of their work. This aesthetic privileged a style of representation that mirrored the technical impartiality of cameras, collapsing distinctions between “most realistic” looking with “most photographic.” The visual clarity of photographic resolution became the standard for the most successful illustrations, even though most subjects depicted required a degree of artistic license to be made visible at all. This dissertation examines the visual techniques developed to reproduce photographic-looking illustrations of unphotographable places. The status of these images as utilitarian was negotiated via a complex web of group consensus and proximity to places like NASA, educational programming at planetariums, and public television. Examining midcentury astronomical illustration as a cultural product instead of neutral technical output offers a new entry point into the visual culture of the Space Age in the United States. This study underscores the way in which socially constructed expectations about the space environment were coded into objective-looking images.