In the days of Neil Buckland, When the Seattle-based artist met a geologist named Tony Irving a few years ago, he had no idea it would initiate an extraterrestrial collaboration. I was photographing ultra-thin sections of meteorites for a project I was working on. Cut Space rocks weren’t particularly exciting at first. Buckland then looked at the 30-micron-thick sample through a pair of his polarizing filters. He was amazed by the vivid collage of colors.
Inspired by the possibilities of photography, Backlund returned to the studio to design a camera system built around a microscope lens mounted on a Pentax DSLR. To create the image, he photographs his 2-millimeter-square portion of the sample at up to 40,000x magnification, then moves the camera slightly to photograph another square. After capturing his 300 to 400 of them, he stitches them all together into a picture that can be viewed up to 12 feet wide. “It’s like the universe inside a pebble,” says Backlund. “From an artistic point of view, I try to show images as big as I am and in as much detail as possible to create an existential shift in perspective.”
Polarized light can reveal different minerals within the sample. For olivine-rich meteorites, such as the one at the beginning of this article, the light enhances greens, oranges, and blues. For scientists, the mineral composition can provide clues to the origin of meteorites. For example, whether the meteorite was created by an asteroid impact he billion years ago, or was ejected by a large impact into another world with a particular mixture of atmospheric gases. It’s also great if you just want to free up space.
