For scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, the night of January 3, 2004 entailed six minutes of nerve-wracking terror. Around 8:30 PM Pacific Time, the Spirit rover began its plunge to the Martian surface, as an audience of engineers and others—temporarily unable to receive any communication from the craft—waited anxiously to get confirmation of its success. Aided by a heat shield, a giant parachute, airbags, and reverse-firing rockets, the rolling robotic laboratory had to decelerate from 12,000 miles per hour to zero miles per hour, with no input from its human designers, who were nervously drumming on their desks in Pasadena. Spirit’s successful landing was a defining moment in the human exploration of Mars.
As part of projects he calls science-driven art, José Francisco Salgado created a mini-movie for each of the seven parts of Holst’s suite, which Holst had based on astrological characteristics of each world. Image credit: José Francisco Salgado (artist).
But how might one capture the gravity of that moment, the tension among observers, the majesty of the feat, and its implications for researchers and the public? Astronomer-turned-filmmaker José Francisco Salgado had some ideas. A few years ago, he put together a film in which that landing event unfolds as a suspenseful, and ultimately heroic, scene. Audiences who attend presentations of the film—one of many in his “Science and Symphony” series—watch a reconstruction of Spirit’s journey on a giant screen while a live orchestra plays “Mars, The Bringer of War” from The Planets, Gustav Holst’s most famous contribution to classical music.
In Salgado’s telling, the visuals and music line up exactly, so that the rover’s stressful fall occurs during a long and building crescendo in Holst’s piece (see https://vimeo.com/46390508). The treads of a rover sigh and settle into the alien soil at the musical conclusion of that build-up—a thundering alarm of blaring trumpets and tympani. Such a scene would feel right at home in any number of science-fiction films.
But it’s not fiction, of course. Through KV 265, the nonprofit company he started to produce films and other projects, Salgado creates what he calls “science-driven art.” For the planets project, he crafted a mini-movie for each of the seven parts of Holst’s suite (Holst based his works on the astrological characteristics—rather than the astronomical facts—of each world, and he didn’t include Earth). All of the films combine real footage with animations, stills, and illustrations from a variety of sources, including historical documents and artist impressions. Salgado’s planet films debuted 14 years ago. Since then, he’s completed and shown six long and four short films which explore topics including the science of night, the differences between natural and artificial light, and how space weather gives rise to the auroras.
“I want images and films that make people say, ‘wow, what is this? What am I looking at?’ Then I have people’s attention, and how fun that I can actually now talk about the science behind the image.”
—José Francisco Salgado
KV 265 has organized more than 200 performances in 18 countries, with more than 400,000 people attending. This year, before the pandemic wreaked havoc, KV 265 had scheduled performances in Victoria, British Columbia; Monterrey, Mexico; South Bend, IN; Chicago, IL; and Nashville, TN. “The craft of putting together those films and the synchronization of the music creates something that’s pretty magical,” says astrophysicist and International Planetarium Society President Mark SubbaRao, who develops programming at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and serves on the board of KV 265.
As an astronomer, Salgado thinks the productions promote science as a visual and emotional experience. He hypothesizes that the combination of music and film can ignite public interest in astronomy and other scientific fields, drawing audience members who typically seek artistic rather than scientific value. Many Science and Symphony performances begin or end with scientific lectures, or are accompanied by educational programs. Before a performance last year in Spokane, WA, for example, astronaut Anne McClain described the experience of visiting the International Space Station. For other performances, Salgado has explained the science behind sunspots and auroras.
“I want images and films that make people say, ‘wow, what is this? What am I looking at?’” Salgado says. “Then I have people’s attention, and how fun that I can actually now talk about the science behind the image.”
Let Them See Mars
The pairing of a live orchestra with dramatic footage is a growing trend among symphonies, says Eduard Zilberkant, conductor and music director of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra in Alaska. A symphony hall might show a Harry Potter or Star Wars film, for example, while the orchestra plays John Williams’ score.
Last October, the Fairbanks orchestra hosted a Science and Symphony event. In addition to “The Planets,” the performance included Claude Debussey’s “Clair de Lune” and “Nocturnes,” matched to footage of the moon and its effects on natural phenomena, such as the world’s largest tides in the Bay of Fundy, in Canada. The event also included “The Blue Danube,” by Strauss, which features prominently in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A trio of pieces by Canadian composer John Estacio was set to a three-part film sequence that showcased the northern lights.
Zilberkant says that the process of matching an orchestra to beats in a film can be “nerve-wracking,” because the experience depends on the sights and sounds converging exactly. But it’s worth the effort: He sees projects like Science and Symphony as a way to broaden the emotional appeal of a symphonic music concert. A typical audience, he says, likely hasn’t seen high-resolution images of the sun or moon or Mars on a big screen, and many haven’t heard these symphonic pieces in their entirety. That combination, he says, especially appeals to younger people accustomed to the stimulation of videos and video games. For them, “it can be really very exciting to hear these pieces.”
The northern lights films begin with footage from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, a NASA satellite that’s been monitoring our nearest star since 2010. As the music builds, the sun releases a ball of plasma, or coronal mass ejection (CME), toward Earth. Energetic particles sent from the solar wind can smash into the Earth’s magnetosphere and cause a geomagnetic storm, which can produce the northern lights’ famous dancing curtains of light. The three films use images to tell the story of how solar weather influences the northern lights, and how the northern lights affect life on Earth, and how every step—from the CME to the glowing rivers in the sky—uses a photon as its particle messenger.
Fairbanks, because of its proximity to the North Pole, is a popular astro-tourism destination for people interested in seeing the northern lights. But Zilberkant says the experience of seeing these science-based stories on screen, while listening to music played live, adds a rich layer to the aurora borealis pilgrimage.
Zilberkant thinks that multimedia performances can bolster connections among areas often seen as separate because they’re not studied together in school. “Mathematics, the sciences, and music all combine into one,” he says.
Sights in Deep Space
Astronomy as a science depends first and foremost on light—both how it travels through space from far-flung galaxies and planets, and how the human brain makes sense of light as data.
“It’s one of the only sciences where images can determine what we’re studying, and the visuals of astronomy do the best job of capturing the imagination,” says astronomer Emily Levesque at the University of Washington in Seattle, author of The Last Stargazers, which was published in August. “We have light to work with, and that’s about it. We are fundamentally tied to pictures.”
Salgado learned this same lesson, implicitly, at a young age. In third grade, his father gave him a small book about the Apollo missions, a gas station giveaway titled We Came in Peace. Its full-color, full-page moon and Earth images piqued his interest in other-worldly wonders. At night, he lay on the roof of his house in Puerto Rico, staring upward. He believed that to study and understand the stars, he had to see them. In eighth grade, his parents gave him his first camera—a Nikon SLR—and he immediately set out taking hundreds of photos of sunsets, sunrises, and the trajectory of the moon from one horizon to the other.
In the late 1990s, as Salgado was finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he began editing images on computers and designing webpages for the astronomy department. Interested in science communication and outreach, he began working at the Adler Planetarium, in Chicago, IL, and he began teaching astronomy classes to adults in the evening.
“These are individuals who already are tired after a long day at work and so on, and then they have to learn all these astronomical concepts, which can be so foreign,” he says. “So one night, accidentally, I found that when I would show my own photographs of the night sky from observatories, the people would light up. The pictures got their attention right away.” He soon began to splice together footage available from NASA and the European Space Agency, with his own films.
In 2006, the Chicago Sinfonietta, a musical group with a mission to increase diversity among professional orchestras, approached Salgado. They were planning a performance of Holst’s suite. Did Salgado have any films they might screen at the same time? It was the opportunity he’d been waiting for.
The film premiered in May 2006 at the Chicago Symphony Center, and the event was so successful that on a sweaty August night in 2008, the orchestra played the music behind a giant screen measuring 45 by 26 feet to a packed crowd in Chicago’s Millennium Park. In 2009, during the International Year of Astronomy celebrations, Salgado’s “Planets” films played during a performance by the Boston Pops. The concert also included narration by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second person to step on the moon.
In 2010, Salgado and two collaborators formed KV 265. The organization gets its name from the Köchel catalog (Köchel-Verzeichnis in German) of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. KV 265 is the catalog entry for the easily recognizable melody of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” (which is also the Alphabet Song, which is also “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”) In addition to the Science and Symphony works, Salgado has collaborated with Tom Bailey (leader of the Thompson Twins, a pop band) and Beyond Pluck, a harp duo that includes his wife, Paula Bressman.
Future Nights
On one afternoon in early 2020, in his studio in Nashville, Tennessee, Salgado was revising and polishing a film featuring artificial and natural light. To capture the video, he had set up a tripod and motion stabilizer on a boat floating down the Seine River in Paris and let the camera run. The resulting time-lapse video captures the city’s lights as they change through the night. In the film he pairs it with shots of much darker places.
“It shows and contrasts the dynamism of a night in the city—with all those artificial lights—with night at the darkest locations on Earth,” he says. “We see the moon and the Milky Way and starlight.” The top of his computer monitor showed the film, shot by shot. Beneath it, the music (“Nocturnes”) had been broken up into tiny pieces, indicating sections where the music changed themes, or grew louder, or abruptly broke off. “When it’s successfully done, the video follows the music very, very closely,” he says. “It’s the opposite of a slideshow.”
Levesque, in Washington, says projects like KV 265 exploit astronomy’s photogenic nature to pique interest in science with a broad audience. “Science is looking at something and asking, why does that work? How does that work?” she says. “Projects like this are great for science. They remind people that science is a human endeavor, that it’s part of their world and not just a school subject.”