Oil on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

Challenging the imagination and celebrating the wonders of our universe.
Besides painting, I don’t know how else to express my immense awe and, in a way, bafflement when trying to comprehend the universe. The sheer scale things! And to think we have constructed machines to explore the solar system and are still drifting far beyond, even now.

The green nebula in the background is the beautiful Lagoon Nebula. It is located close to the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Around 1654 an Italian astronomer by the name of Giovanni Hodierna was the first to recognize that the Lagoon Nebula wasn’t a star or comet, and he is credited for discovering it. The nebula is also known as M8 for short or NGC 6523.

The Lagoon Nebula is so named because of the dark band that separates it in two. The darkness looks like a lagoon surrounded by an island of light. There is a denser part of the nebula within the Lagoon that’s called the Hourglass.

The Lagoon Nebula is visible on very dark, clear nights in the Sagittarius constellation. It’s the densest part of the Milky Way because you’re looking towards the center of the galaxy. This area of the sky is very bright and full of nebulae, star clusters, and other deep space objects.