Tom Turner loves the moon, and he wants other people to love it too. In his series, Lunar Calendars, he alters images from NASA and the European Space Agency to highlight the moon’s phases, its movement through time and space. The result are trippy, neon images that resemble the exaggerated "false color" photos NASA released to show the varied surfaces of Pluto or plant growth on Earth.
"Most of my work has been about putting the magic back in the landscape. By adding all these colors I'm trying to inspire people to look freshly at the places that we should value," he says.
Turner started pondering the moon last summer when he caught a brief educational program on lunar phases at the McDonald Observatory in Ft. Davis, Texas. The idea came to him after the New Year, when a few lunar calendars popped up in his Facebook feed. He began researching them obsessively online. For the project, he recreates some calendars — which originate from Australia, Europe and North America — and invents others, showing his own depictions of lunar phases and phenomena.
The key to Turner’s series is color. In each image, Turner takes three different photographs of the moon and assigns one to the red channel, one to the green, and one to the blue. In Photoshop, he flips the green vertically and the red horizontally while leaving the blue alone. When the three images overlap, the resulting distortion creates a "magical glow" that Turner says appears three-dimensional with appropriate glasses.
Patterns also play an important role. In one image, he arranges photographs from every lunar phase of the year in neat rows and columns. In another, he depicts the stages of a lunar eclipse in a figure eight pattern. In several, the moon appears to be moving in an orbit; sometimes it’s a stable motion, other times it’s an erratic one. Turner decided to use copyright-free images from organizations like NASA to reinforce the idea that the moon belongs to everyone, and to emphasize that it should be appreciated as a treasure that cuts across borders.
He notes with the recent exploration at the outer reaches of our solar system, we've forgotten about the celestial body that he says started it all. "We have space exploration out toward Pluto now. We continue to look outward, we're no longer actually recognizing the importance of the thing that inspired all astronomers throughout time," he says. "It all started by looking at the moon. That's the thing that every little kid looks at and says, 'I wonder what's out there.'"
