Sky: Atmospheres and Aesthetic Distance in Planetary and Lunar Environments

Abstract

While much of Western aesthetics has been influenced by early concepts of ideal beauty and a later ideal of disinterested contemplation of works of art, some contemporary aestheticians argue for an aesthetics of environment itself, both built and natural. Sensory perception is by definition implicit to aesthetic perception, and an artist, working in an environment which not only is a source of sensory information but additionally may be a source of personal aesthetic experience, produces works which may have aesthetic value as reflections of aspects of an intelligible universe – aesthetic value which may be informed by the artist’s own aesthetic experience of environment. To the earthbound observer, that portion of environment referred to as ‘the sky’ is a subjective uniquely-framed window to the rest of the universe, individually cropped by local horizons and nearby physical/structural barriers. An individual’s sky field-of-view may vary from a restricted few degrees of visual angle defined by an opening in a rainforest canopy to the unrestricted panorama of sky seen from a mountaintop and viewable in its entirety only by fully turning ones gaze through all points of the compass. Though Earth’s clear night sky is essentially transparent, the daytime lighting of its atmosphere, whether cloudy or clear, blinds earthbound observers to extraterrestrial astronomical phenomena with the exception of those involving the sun, moon, and (somewhat briefly) the brightest stars and planets. Similarly throughout the solar system, the absence, presence, and properties of atmospheres will be fundamental determinants of aesthetic distance and therefore of aesthetic experience of planetary and lunar environments as well as of extraplanetary and extralunar astronomical phenomena.