Hubble Images Turned Into Art

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- It's a light show 13 billion years in the making.

Alex DeMetrick reports science gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope is being turned into public art, free for the viewing.

German artist Tim Roth has picked a big canvas and an even bigger subject. Using the front of the Maryland Science Center, he is using lasers to capture the universe.

"These are very distant objects. These are galaxies. These are very early stars which were much bigger," Roth said.

So why doesn't it look like stars and galaxies? The science that went into the art comes from the Hubble Space Telescope that sees light invisible to the human eye and separates it into different colors, much like a computer disc does.

"And we can see the defracted light from the sky from our sun," Roth said.

That light invisible to our eyes is plotted out and packs far more information than what is visible.

"Inside all those bumps and squiggles, there's information," said Ken Sembach, Space Telescope Institute. "What the temperature of these objects are, how far away they are, what they're made of, how much matter there is out there."

Visitors to the Inner Harbor attracted to the light might not know what they're looking at and that's part of the point.

"Oh, they think this is a heartbeat. It might be a brain wave, so they get interested," Roth said.

The laser exhibit runs nightly from now through Oct. 18, from 7 to 11 p.m.