Childhood of the Planets
Hoang Nguyen
May 16th, 2025
Major: Astronomy
Genre/Medium: digital illustration
About the work:
Now having established a visual code to convey hidden meaning, I invert the situation from The Artifact—Psyche the spacecraft recedes back to an observer role, and the planets take center stage. After all, Psyche’s dream is the main focus of the image: the planets, still forming in the accretion disk, the little planetary nursery, run counterclockwise around the Sun—we remember the counterclockwise motion in The Artifact, turning back the clock and looking at a scene from the solar system’s history.
The spacecraft watches this scene from beyond a haze of surreality. I wanted to paint almost as if Psyche were seeing it by candlelight, which is how Baroque paintings would have been viewed in their time. In my mind, it gives a sense of closeness with the planets’ history.
Some familiar figures make themselves known in each corner of the image: Psyche the spacecraft facing the Sun, the android I’ve become so used to drawing, the inner solar system seen on a glance back, and a mysterious veiled someone who has appeared before, in a different form, and who reappears here to smile on the scene, the unveiling of history.
Psyche might have been a part of a planetesimal, a small body that could grow to become a planet. If that were the case, what could we learn about the childhood of the planets? This is the idea around which I built the piece, but at the bottom of the frame, a sleeping lamb reminds us that this is still only a theory, while at the top, the image of the asteroid reminds us of the destination. In this scene glowing gold with a promise of discovery, we continue to dream of what’s to come.
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