Though Fourth Genre has not usually been much concerned with outer space, twice recently we've chosen images from NASA to adorn our covers. For one thing, they're brilliantly colorful and deeply suggestive. For another, they're in the public domain, so we don't have to pay to use them. The first photo, from the Mars Express visit to the red planet's frozen south pole, presents an abstract field of ridged color from white to pink to burgundy, confounding our impulse to resolve what we see into categories or meaning. Most readers likely have to check the caption on the inside front cover, or read the issue's editorial note, to learn enough to label what they see. This current issue's cover presents a more recognizable and more recent image, from the Webb Space Telescope, showing star formation in the Carina Nebula, 7,600 light-years from earth. You've likely seen this image among several others this past summer when NASA first received and released them. They were all over social media, nearly always attached to expressions of awe and wonder, sometimes with notes of humble pride in the collective achievements of humanity, sometimes with calls for responsible stewardship of our tiny corner of the universe, sometimes with exhortations toward unity and harmony, sometimes without comment, until the comments began, nearly always arriving at similar expressions of amazement. This image, even if we don't know its exact source, readily fits our received understanding of such things, so that we can easily label it “space” or “stars” or perhaps “nebula” (with its etymological roots in “mist” or “clouds”) and most of us likely share some feeling of the inexpressible sublimity of what we see.How much of our response is innate, and how much is conditioned or determined by our knowledge of what this image represents? How much, in other words, does awe depend on context? A toddler might feel curiosity or interest at the picture, but surely would not feel vanishingly small. And how is our response culturally conditioned? How is it that the Webb images evoke such similar expressions about the vastness and wonder of the universe?The more we learn about the image and what it represents, the more we expand our ability to engage with, interpret, and understand what we see. For instance, the name of the misty formation, the Carina Nebula, comes simply from its home constellation, Carina, which is found in the southern sky and thus may not be familiar to most of us reading this note. Carina comes from the Latin for “keel” or “hull” and refers to the Argo, as Carina is one third of the larger constellation Argo Navis, broken into three bits (along with Puppis (poop deck) and Vela (sails)). Of course, the name Argo conjures all sorts of mythological associations (and maybe even modern cinematic ones, via Ben Affleck's efforts, of the Iran hostage crisis and the fake sci-fi film Tony Mendez conjured to provide cover as he rescued six embassy workers), foremost of golden fleeces and, via Roland Barthes's mismemory of Plutarch, recently perpetuated by Maggie Nelson, of the philosophical conundrum of whether a ship (the ship of Theseus in Plutarch, the Argo in Barthes and Nelson) whose parts have all been gradually replaced remains itself or has become a new entity. The suggestions accumulate inexhaustibly! And here we've only feinted toward the connections and associations available in a single label, the name Carina. We might spend a lifetime chasing ideas down this rabbit hole (or even consider the “rabbit hole” as metaphor itself) or visit the nextdoor nebula, named after Chile's Nobel-prizewinning poet Gabriela Mistral, whose chosen surname resonates etymologically with “nebula” and derives both from fellow poet Frédéric Mistral and the northwesterly winds of the Mediterranean (and certainly one or both Mistrals would have something to say about our project here), without even getting to why Fourth Genre's editors might have preferred the Carina Nebula to any number of other Webb telescope images or why we might name this essay, punningly, with the nebula's name repeated, thus conjuring associations to a song we barely know and a movie we've never seen.Setting aside the linguistic-metaphorical, what of scientific information about what we see in this photo? For instance, NASA reports that “the tallest ‘peaks’ in this image are about 7 light-years high,” an additional level of mind-boggling added to the already incomprehensible. And what we might interpret as a peaceful, even calming scene, derives from great storm and stress (a pairing of alliterative terms borrowed and translated from the German Romantic “Sturm und Drang” movement) as off-camera infant stars rip at the edges of the nebula with “intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds.” The colors and shapes we see we could never see in “real life,” as they're “seen” only via the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Thus these instruments provide a kind of translation of reality into a form of visible light that our eye-brain is able to perceive.What's more, you may have noticed that our cover rotates the image sideways from the direction it's usually presented in. But, really, no one can say which orientation is the “correct” one. Even the notion of following the natural wavelike flow of deep orange “clouds” to form a horizon or a wall is an imposition. Even the rectangular frame necessary for online or journal-cover presentation is an artificial cropping (and, of course, here we assume a “portrait” alignment based on the positioning and direction of the text, both on the cover and inside the journal; another convention). In this image, even the octo-directional diffraction spikes from the hundreds of stars are aligned to the frame. These lightspokes are caused by two overlapping effects: the telescope's hexagonal primary mirrors reflecting light in such ways that it interferes with itself according to the mirrors’ edges, and the secondary mirror's support struts, which in the Webb telescope's case are shaped like a peace sign, and which make for perpendicular interferences. None of these quite represent “nonfictional reality” (the naked eye, were one to be positioned close enough to see these stars at this magnitude, would register only circles of light), and yet they do represent a representation of reality, the most detailed representation of this particular reality that our species has yet achieved. Humans have known for hundreds of years that each person's up is someone else's down, that no one is “on top of the world” except in so far as we all are, all the time; yet most of us, most of the time, still find it impossible to break out of the perspective we've inherited. So it's healthy to turn things on their side and reinterpret, to invite ourselves into a different perspective, one that doesn't map so neatly onto our expectations of a “horizon” or “waves” or “mountains” or whathaveyou. To try to escape the ready-made interpretive modes that suggest and sometimes even convince us that experience comes prepackaged with particular meaning. To remind ourselves that despite the limitations of our various subjective frames of reference, despite the selectivity and relativity of any understanding we might achieve, there are still sublime truths to be found in the framing, even if they are necessarily bound and limited.