Altered Zones

Today we are treated to the collaborative fruits of recently profiled artist Hubble and the telescope itself.  Ben Greenberg, aka Hubble, crafted the ambient drone and mesmerizing fret taps of Hubble Drums' cut "Hubble's Hubble" to soundtrack the cosmic imagery captured by The Hubble Space Telescope in the video above.  This science-meets-art pairing is all the result of two dudes listening to tunes over a Thanksgiving dinner.  In an interview with NPR's Lars Gotrich, Ben Greenberg, aka Hubble, explains:

The collaboration was the brainchild of two great men over a great meal, and naturally I wasn't either of them. Michael Azerrad wrote the book Our Band Could Be Your Life (and, more important to my early musical development, Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana) and Max Mutchler works at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI for short, he also discovered Pluto's second and third moons — so cool!). Michael showed Max my music over last year's Thanksgiving dinner, and a short while later I received an email from Max proposing that we work together. Max set me up with Tiffany Borders over at STScI, and I brought in Sheena Callage to help put the whole thing together.  As obvious as this may seem in retrospect, there's no way I could have come up with it on my own.

Greenberg clarifies that what we are looking at in this video is the M81 galaxy:

Its spiral arms wind all the way down into the nucleus and are made up of young, bluish, hot stars formed in the past few million years, while the central bulge contains older, redder stars. Zooming directly into this red center, we wind up in the midst of the glowing gas ejected by a dying Sun-like star called a planetary nebula. We continue to explore other planetary nebula forms with amazing and confounding shapes. They dance for us, and morph into one another, entrancing and beautiful, inviting reflection on our place in the Universe, tenuous as it is. At the musical, physical, and emotional climax, we confront a light echo, the expanding illumination of a dusty cloud around a star, pulsating along with the music, echoing the grand celestial end, but also foreshadowing an inevitable and shattering re-birth.

Hubble Dreams is out now on Northern Spy. Release party at 285 Kent in Brooklyn tomorrow night. --Mark Craig, Altered Zones via NPR