I first explored the conceptual problem of space photos when I staged an art gallery exhibition during the 1980s, near the Polytechnic University of Athens, Greece. Various journalists and local television personalities turned up to scrutinize my close-up prints of the “map of the universe.”

The foremost panoramic optical view of the entire sky was made during the middle of the 20th century under the direction of astronomer Knut Lundmark at the Lund Observatory in Sweden (the first Hasselblad camera in space was Swedish made). To construct the image, draftsmen used a mathematical distortion (Aitoff projection) to map the sky with the plane of the Milky Way along the center and the north galactic pole at the top.

In this way, the oval map is really an optical illusion. What appear to be the distant left and right wings of a flattened plane are part of the same curved space that wraps around us and joins up behind our star system. Accordingly, we are actually located in the center of the curved sky map, although we get the flat impression of being outside of it.

The Milky Way clouds, or the collective glow of stars in the densely populated galactic plane, are accurately drafted and mixed with dark dust lanes. 7,000 individual stars are shown as white dots indicating brightness. The end product is photographic in quality and represents the entire observable sky. The map took two years to complete and is usually referred to as the Lund Panorama of the visible universe.

Alexis Kostalas, one of Greece’s best-known performing arts journalists and the official presenter of the 2004 Olympic Games of Athens, was one of several visitors who came to my exhibition to investigate the bizarre power of pareidolia. At first, I considered the space photo stuff to be little more than a speculative task of finding patterns. But since then, remarkable discoveries in biology forced me to enlarge my way of thinking about what the space pictures might possibly disclose.

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