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National Geographic : 1974 May
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"Asmall...planet...of aminor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy' THE INSIGNIFICANCE of our earth in the immensity of the universe, so provocatively described by poet Archibald MacLeish, unfolds in this sequence of paintings. With each successive look the viewer stands vastly farther back, yet each larger scene still takes in but a fraction of the cosmos. Gleaming among neighbor stars (left), the golden sun reigns over its planets: Earth on the left, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter to the right, ranged along an imaginary line roughly indicating their planes of orbit. This solar realm, so enormous to the earthbound, shrinks dramatically when set in its niche toward the rim of our Milky Way galaxy (above), home of a hundred billion stars. The Milky Way itself seems to contract when viewed amid its cluster of sister galaxies (upper right). And even that cluster pales in a far wider view of space (right). 596
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