By Jon Lomberg, an artist’s statement for Cosmic Honu
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| Photo: Jon Lomberg’s painting, “Pacific
Space Turtle” connects Honu (Hawaiian for turtle) to
cosmology. Courtesy of Jon Lomberg. |
On most mornings I swim in the ocean, and am often able to
observe green sea turtles, swimming with such dignity and grace.
They seem so wise and ancient, and indeed their species has
been around far longer than mammals like us (over 60 million
years). Turtles are in the myths of many cultures. The Babylonians
imagined that the world was carried through cosmic space on
the back of a great turtle.
In 2003 I painted a Honu to illustrate this ancient connection
of turtles and cosmology. I added my own poetic metaphor: the
planet and the turtle are very similar. Our planet moves through
space like an organism swims through the ocean.
When I saw the turtle sculpture for It’s a Honu World, I was
delighted to find exactly the same pose as in my painting!
In honor of the enormous contributions the Keck Observatory
has given us in our understanding of the universe, I present
this Cosmic Honu. Fifty centuries after the Babylonians, we
carry in our minds new images of a far more immense universe,
in which our own Milky Way Galaxy is a barely visible smudge,
on the outskirts of the nearest large cluster of galaxies,
called the Virgo Cluster.
Every little blob of color on the turtle’s back is a galaxy
containing millions of stars. Clusters of galaxies stretch
into enormous filaments with millions of galaxies in each one.
These filaments surround awesome voids in which there are no
galaxies at all.
But Keck and other great observatories are finding that these
voids may contain something much stranger, something that is
accelerating the motion of the galaxies as the universe expands.
We have learned in the past few years about a mysterious force
called Dark Energy which may reside in these voids. Dark Energy
surrounds us, though we cannot perceive it directly. But it
is strong enough to spin the galaxies into this cosmic web.
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| Photo: The Americas reflected in the eye
of the Cosmic Honu. The five foot sculpture is currently
on display at Observatory headquarters in Waimea and
is available for purchase to benefit the frontiers of
Keck science. Courtesy of WMKO. |
The Dark Energy shaped the Cosmos
The Cosmos shaped the galaxies.
The Galaxy shaped the Sun.
The Sun shaped the Earth.
The Earth shaped the Sea.
The Sea shaped Life.
And Life shaped a million different animals, including turtles
and us.
The turtle swims through the sea,
The Earth glides through space.
The turtle and the planet are one.
The planet and the Cosmos are one.
The Cosmos is inside us and we are inside it.
We carry the history of the Universe within us.
We are the eyes with which the Cosmos sees itself. 
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