This artist's photo book includes all 26 images in the Celestial Bodies series of photo-based digital art works. The book is a meditation on the ground-breaking event of Galileo training his specially augmented telescope on the sky and interpreting what he saw according to what he knew about formations on our own planet. This was a radical act for his time. The artist developed a sympathy for this man, making connections between things we can see close at hand and things that are much too vast or novel for easy comprehension.

The striking Celestial Bodies series is composite digital images which provide fascinating windows onto worlds either too small or too large for human apprehension (as critic Mark Jenkins writes in a review in the Washington Post). This photo-based digital art combines direct scans and photographs of elliptical objects from three categories: plant; animal; and human-made. Many of the original objects are quite small and, when scanned at very high resolution, surprising and interesting textures and details can be discovered. They are layered and blended using the artist’s imagination and computer software. The original limited editions are printed by the artist in high-resolution archival inkjet (limited edition prints are available from the Etsy shop, LedaBlackFineArt). You can look at these art works again and again and see new things.

There are 26 in the Celestial Bodies series, one for each letter of the English alphabet, and named for stars, moons, asteroids, or comets, from “Aldebaran” to “Zosma.” The artist sometimes chose colors and objects based on the astronomical namesakes, and if the celestial object is a double star she sometimes made a double-round image (like for Hadar and Sirius). However, these images are by no means literal depictions of these astronomical objects. Rather, they are imaginative riffs on the fundamental principle that all the stuff we see around us was created in the explosions of stars.