DARKEST NIGHT

Ages have come and gone since Vincent Van Gogh took madness and turned it into a scene permanently etched into the human artistic canon. After viewing 'The Starry Night' in person, the muse was summoned, and the act of inspiration resulted in this modern rendition; titled "Dark Night", in lieu of the knowledge that we have and that Van Gogh did not.

The world, as we know it now, is not the static, homogenous and understandable place we thought it was. Indeed, the night sky that Van Gogh painted was not nearly as empty as we thought. We now know that 70% of the Universe is made of invisible dark energy, and that the equally invisible dark matter makes up about 25%. Not only do we not have any idea about what these strange materials are, or why they make up almost the entire universe, but we have found that some strange property of theirs is indeed causing the universe to expand. Galaxies and planets are somehow growing further and further away from each other, meaning that soon, light from distant shores that we see as tiny pricks of silver in our sky may one day vanish. And indeed, how many gems once shone in the sky that are so far from us now that even the speed of light can overcome the distance? This modern rendition of 'The Starry Night' holds a dark and melancholic future for us in mind.

The red in this image comes from the fact that as an object moves further and further away from Earth, its wavelength (the part that determines its color), get's shifted towards the 'red' end, making the image appear to have a red-light filter.