Space tattoos are striking in their diversity. Realistic images of galaxies, miniature drawings of planets, portraits of astronauts and images of UFOs have become subjects for tattoos more than once. The boundless expanses of the universe attract people with their secrets and discoveries. The childhood dream of becoming an astronaut is also embodied in bright tattoos.

In any style of tattoo, you can successfully bring the space theme to life.

Space Tattoo Meaning

There are several basic meanings of Space Tattoos

1. Mystery, unknown

Until now, scientists have not been able to fully explore even the solar system, not to mention more distant spaces. People have always been drawn to the unknown, so the space theme attracts the attention of tattoo lovers.

2. Dreaminess, purposefulness, thirst for discovery

Many people in childhood dreamed of becoming an astronaut. This children's bright dream reincarnates over the years into a thirst for knowledge, science, and the acquisition of new knowledge. Personality comes to adult independent life, as in outer space, where there are many mysteries and mysteries. But with the help of knowledge, courage and determination, a person learns the world.

3. Man is part of the Cosmos

Everything in the universe is interconnected. Many people believe that space is the opposite of chaos. That the structure of the world is designed to ensure that everything interacts with each other. Space tattoo in this case will become a symbol of the unity of man and the world, space, celestial bodies.

Popular Places and Plots Tattoo Space

Tattoo Space Sleeve

The plot for voluminous sleeve tattoos most often becomes realistic images of cosmic bodies. Planets, stars, meteor showers and comets in bright colors look mesmerizing. The more detailed the master draws the sketch, the more magical and unrealistic the final version of the tattoo looks.

Space Tattoo on Wrist

It is customary to depict minimalistic concise drawings. It can be small sketches of planets or stars.

Astronaut Tattoo

An astronaut can symbolize a brave, courageous pioneer. The first cosmonauts, such as Yuri Gagarin, were not just professionals, but national heroes. Many years later, the conquest of space remains a landmark event for mankind, and astronauts symbolize progress, masculinity and a thirst for discovery.

UFO tattoo

Flying saucer tattoos are chosen by people with a good sense of humor. Unidentified flying objects symbolize fantasy, the ability to be surprised. Sometimes a UFO can become a talisman for creative people or science fiction lovers.

Planet Tattoo

Planets are often depicted on a tattoo in a row, in the order of the solar system. It can be a black and white tattoo or a realism tattoo.

Rocket Tattoo

The rocket is a symbol of space exploration. This is an object that flies to its target at great speed in order to make new discoveries. Such a tattoo will appeal to active people who love adventure and travel. Discovering the world around you is no less interesting than conquering space.

Black and White Tattoo Space

Despite the color variety of celestial bodies, black and white tattoos do not lose their popularity in the space theme. Planets or the moon look beautiful in black and white.

Small Space Tattoos

Small space-themed tattoos are schematic images of celestial bodies, or geometric shapes filled with a starry sky. Most often, small tattoos are placed on the wrist or forearm.

Space Tattoo Men - Space Tattoo Designs for Men

No matter how much we peer into space, it still remains a mystery to us. This is probably what attracts tattoo lovers who cover their bodies with stellar plots. These people are often called romantics, irrational dreamers. However, this is not always true. Consider the fashionable look of underwear painting in more detail.

Space tattoo meaning

The refutation of the fact that only irrational people fill themselves with space is the symbolism of the Universe itself. Despite the little knowledge of the boundless space, it is often associated with order, something complete, complete. And the famous philosopher Plato once even equated it with a person. The complex structure of the galaxy seemed to him similar in structure to the consciousness of people. From this we can conclude that the owners of space tattoos are primarily looking for harmony with the world in themselves. They want to feel, to see their inner self in the mirror. And only then do dreams come.

Others use the well-known symbolism of the planets of the solar system to form their personal brand. To emphasize its "beginning", to make visible its main features. In addition, each planet has a binding to the sign of the Zodiac. This interpretation has the right to life, since the Cosmos tattoo in its modern form is a fairly young direction. Previously, they depicted graphic contours of constellations, astronauts, rockets, etc. Now colored streamers, large images of planets are in fashion. Let us consider their possible interpretation in more detail.

The meaning of the tattoo of the planets

Each of the planets known to mankind has a certain set of symbolic representations. The most universal are the following theses:

• The sun refers to male images, symbolizing strength and indestructible energy. The widespread application of a tattoo with the image of the sun is also due to the former status of the luminary. Previously, it was revered as a deity. Therefore, the owners of such a tattoo may well count on divine protection.
• The moon refers to female images. She is often associated with a deep mystery, a cosmic mystery. Moonlight brings peace and fulfillment of secret desires
• Mars is often associated with boldness and aggressive masculinity. The character of a person with this planet on the body can have explosive power.
• Mercury is the patron of travelers, businessmen, in general, all those who do not sit in one place. The messenger of the gods promises good luck to the bearers of his image
• Venus is too obvious a symbol to paint it in detail. Recall only about her love traits, from time to time manifested in every person.
• Saturn is considered a symbol of wisdom and high spiritual level. Therefore, a man over 30 or even 40 years old often becomes the owner of a tattoo with this planet.
• The earth is too universal to be judged unequivocally. In any case, the tattoo has positive energy, and attracts good luck. Usually popular with the female half of humanity. This is easily explained by the existence of a stable "Earth-Mother" link. 

However, not only known planets can be found on the bodies of space lovers. Distant stars and zodiac constellations are also meant to say something about the owner of the tattoo. It can be both a binding to luck, and a more "narrow" meaning. For example, a star on the wrist may indicate unusual sexual preferences. And there are a lot of such subtleties, in fact. Therefore, you should carefully study the information about the heavenly bodies before recklessly stuffing them onto the body.

Wait, don't rush.)) Firstly, scientists, of course, are interested in images in the visible range no less than in other ranges. The waves of this spectrum are not worse than others in terms of information content, they simply relate to other characteristics. They provide crucial information about the composition of the atmosphere and the composition of rocks visible in the image, for example. Secondly, science is a very expensive thing, so now scientists are constantly concerned about the presentation of their activities to people. This is taught from school, ordinary taxpayers and sponsors should understand what money is spent on and for this, beautiful and understandable pictures are needed.

Now the question is, why do scientists "paint" pictures in approximate colors? And here in the answer of Roman Khmelevsky one fundamental point is completely ignored. The fact is that the planets are objects that do not emit their own light. What color we see objects that do not emit their own light depends on what kind of lighting at the time of observation. At dusk, all cats are gray, right?) What color is your red shirt at night? Black. And if you shine on it through the blue curtains? If you turn on an incandescent lamp (yellowish)? And if you turn on a gas discharge lamp with a cold blue-white light? In photography there is a concept: "white balance". Any color digital photograph is (simplifying) three shots in filters (red, green, blue). But! This is only the ratio of signals, but not their brightness as you saw it, but the brightness that is determined by exposure and aperture; and the unknown exact position of the resulting signal ratio (it is determined by the illumination). The camera does not know what kind of lighting it was - whether the Sun was at dawn, or in the evening, or at its zenith, whether there were clouds, whether it was through the green foliage. Therefore, the photographer establishes with his hands what kind of lighting was. Or puts automatic detection. In this case, the program analyzes the image and tries to determine what kind of lighting it was by the nature of the image (primarily the sky, clouds, the presence of faces). Professional photographers know how often the white balance program fails, especially in mixed lighting conditions (the Sun or an incandescent lamp + a gas discharge lamp, for example, gives blue halos on objects). Therefore, they place a target (an object with a standard color - a certain shade of gray, or just a white sheet of paper) in the control frame, then the program simply indicates that this object should be gray, and from here it is clear what shift should be given to all other colors obtained on picture to make them look like they were taken.

And now let’s remember that we don’t know in advance the shooting conditions on other planets, we don’t know the composition of the atmosphere, the presence and composition of dust in the atmosphere, we don’t know how brightly the Sun shines, and perhaps we shoot in the dark at all. And we cannot place our target there. Now it is clear that we often simply cannot know exactly how what we shoot on another planet looks like in color. That is why scientists set the white balance for such pictures conditionally, as they think it should look like.

In the case of shooting space objects that emit light (and they are all very far away and therefore very weak) and those objects where there is very little reflected light, there is another problem. To register a weak signal, you need to work longer, therefore we heat up more. And heating is noise, distortion of information. Therefore, if the source is weak, then black-and-white cameras are often used with forced cooling (carbon dioxide or liquid nitrogen, for example). Or complex post-processing is used to isolate and remove noise. Such programs are also able to add many individual frames to "amplify" the signal. There is a similar thing in Photoshop, but special programs are much more complicated (the requirements for the reliability of the result are different, and the noise from the signal in the case of a simple dot image is very difficult to distinguish) and still work for a very long time.

The miraculous structure of the Cosmos and the harmony in it can only be explained by the fact that the Cosmos was created according to the plan of an omniscient and omnipotent Being. Here is my first and last word.

Isaac Newton

Misconceptions about space

There is an opinion that the Cosmos is black and white. However, this is misleading.Color images taken by astronomers using orbiting telescopes show that cosmic bodies are, for the most part, extraordinarily colorful. Why don't we see this riot of colors? The reason for our cosmic color blindness is not only in the huge distances to the observed objects, but also in some features of our vision. It was found that we can distinguish the color of an object well when the flow of light energy emitted or reflected by it is sufficiently intense. In those cases when it is close to the maximum distinguishable, the object seems to us monotonously gray, although it is not.

Nor is interstellar space itself black. American astronomers from the University of Baltimore were able to determine its color by analyzing more than 200,000 photographs. By adding all the colors available to astronomers, they got the average color of the universe. And it turned out to be not black at all, but turquoise with an aquamarine tint. Astronomers reported this discovery in 2002. But more recently, in 2003, scientists apologized and said that the universe, most likely, has a beige color. As it turned out, an error crept into the previous results due to a virus in the computer that distorted the program that translated cosmic radiation into visible colors.

With the color of the Earth itself, too, everything is still not clear. Usually our planet is called blue - that's what it looks like in color photographs taken from space. But scientists believe this definition is not entirely correct. The predominance of blue color in photographs is explained by the fact that the main part of the Earth's surface is covered with water, which absorbs red rays well and reflects the blue part of the spectrum. The nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere of our planet has approximately the same properties. So it turns out that most of the red rays are subtracted from the reflected light and blue prevails.

Space is often called lifeless. However, it is difficult to accept such misconceptions. Life in space is in full swing. If we draw analogies with terrestrial weather phenomena, then there the cosmic wind blows, cosmic rains fall, cosmic thunders rumble and cosmic lightnings sparkle. Space storms and hurricanes are not uncommon. Scientists observing these processes claim that cosmic life is in no way inferior to earthly life in terms of the richness of forms of manifestations and diversity.

The recent discovery of scientists from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, made with the help of a unique radio telescope located in the town of Simeiz, also refutes the myth of the lifelessness of the Cosmos. Crimean astrophysicists managed to record in space a huge number of organic molecules - more than a hundred types - water and even alcohols, which are especially numerous in the constellation Orion.

This cosmic discovery is, oddly enough, another breakthrough in understanding the origin of life on Mother Earth. Until recently, scientists claimed that we all “came out” from the bottom of the oceans. Recently, however, more and more adherents are found by the theory, according to which the seed that laid the foundation for everything that exists on Earth was brought from the unknown depths of the Universe. The observations of the Crimean astronomers show that this is indeed possible, and life on our planet came after all from the Cosmos…

Photographs from space published on the website of NASA and other space agencies often attract the attention of those who doubt their authenticity - critics find traces of editing, retouching or color manipulation in the images. This has been the case since the birth of the "lunar conspiracy", and now the pictures taken not only by Americans, but also by Europeans, Japanese, Indians have come under suspicion. Together with the N + 1 portal, we understand why space images are processed at all and whether they can, despite this, be considered authentic.

In order to correctly evaluate the quality of satellite images that we see on the Web, two important factors must be taken into account. One of them is related to the nature of the interaction between agencies and the general public, the other is dictated by physical laws.

Public relations

Space images are one of the most effective means of popularizing the work of research missions in near and far space. However, not all frames are immediately available to the media.

Images obtained from space can be divided into three groups: "raw" (raw), scientific and public. Raw, or original, files from spacecraft are sometimes available to everyone, and sometimes not. For example, images taken by the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers or Saturn's moon Cassini are published in near real time, so that anyone can see them at the same time as scientists studying Mars or Saturn. Raw photos of the Earth from the ISS are uploaded to a separate NASA server. Astronauts flood them by the thousands, and no one has time to pre-process them. The only thing that is added to them on Earth is a geo-referencing to facilitate the search.

Usually public footage that is attached to press releases from NASA and other space agencies is criticized for retouching, because it is they who catch the eye of Internet users in the first place. And if you want, you can find a lot of things there. And color manipulation:

Photo of the landing platform of the Spirit rover in the visible range of light and with the capture of the near infrared.
(c) NASA/JPL/Cornell

And overlaying multiple shots:

Earthrise over the lunar crater Compton.

And copypasta:

Fragment Blue Marble 2001
(c) NASA/Robert Simmon/MODIS/USGS EROS

And even direct retouching, with overwriting of some fragments of the image:

Bleached shotApollo 17 Expedition GPN-2000-001137.
(c) NASA

NASA's motivation in the case of all these manipulations is so simple that not everyone is ready to believe it: it's more beautiful.

But the truth is, the bottomless blackness of space looks more impressive when it is not interfered with by debris on the lens and charged particles on the film. A color frame is, indeed, more attractive than a black and white one. The panorama from the pictures is better than individual frames. It is important that in the case of NASA, you can almost always find the original frames and compare one with the other. For example, the original version (AS17-134-20384) and the “printable” version (GPN-2000-001137) of this image from Apollo 17, which is cited as almost the main evidence of the retouching of lunar photographs:

Frame comparison AS17-134-20384 and GPN-2000-001137
(c) NASA

Or find the rover's "selfie stick" that "disappeared" while taking its self-portrait:

Curiosity snapshots from Jan 14, 2015 Sol 868
(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The Physics of Digital Photography

As a general rule, those who blame space agencies for manipulating color, using filters, or publishing black-and-white photographs "in this age of digital advancement" do not take into account the physical processes of obtaining digital images. They believe that if a smartphone or camera immediately gives out color frames, then the spacecraft should be even more capable of it, and they don’t even know what complex operations are needed to get a color image on the screen right away.

Let's explain the theory of digital photography: the matrix of a digital camera is, in fact, a solar battery. If there is light, there is current; if there is no light, there is no current. Only the matrix is ​​​​not a single battery, but many small batteries - pixels, from each of which the output of current is read individually. The optics focuses the light onto the photomatrix, and the electronics reads the intensity of energy release by each pixel. From the received data, an image is built in grayscale - from zero current in the dark to maximum in the light, that is, at the output it turns out to be black and white. To make it colored, you need to apply color filters. It turns out, oddly enough, that color filters are present in every smartphone and in every digital camera from the nearest store! (For some, this information is banal, but, according to the author's experience, for many it will turn out to be news.) In the case of conventional photographic equipment, alternating red, green and blue filters are used, which are alternately superimposed on individual pixels of the matrix - this is the so-called Bayer filter .

The Bayer filter consists of half green pixels, and red and blue each occupy one quarter of the area.
(c) Wikimedia

Here we repeat: navigation cameras produce black-and-white images because such files weigh less, and also because color is simply not needed there. Science cameras allow you to extract more information about space than the human eye can perceive, and therefore they use a wider range of color filters:

Matrix and filter drum of the OSIRIS instrument on Rosetta
(c) MPS

The use of a near-infrared filter, which is not visible to the eye, instead of red, caused Mars to turn red in many frames that were leaked to the media. Not all of the explanation about the infrared range was reprinted, which gave rise to a separate discussion, which we also analyzed in the material “What color is Mars”.

However, the Curiosity rover has a Bayer filter, which allows it to shoot in the color familiar to our eyes, although a separate set of color filters is also attached to the camera.

(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The use of separate filters is more convenient in terms of choosing the ranges of light in which you want to look at the object. But if this object moves quickly, then in the pictures in different ranges its position changes. On the frames of Electro-L, this was noticeable on fast clouds, which had time to move in a matter of seconds, while the satellite changed the filter. On Mars, this happened when shooting sunsets at the Spirit and Opportunity rovers - they do not have a Bayer filter:

Sunset taken by Spirit in Sol 489 Superposition of images taken with filters at 753,535 and 432 nanometers.
(c) NASA/JPL/Cornell

On Saturn, Cassini has similar difficulties:

Saturn's moons Titan (behind) and Rhea (in front) in Cassini images
(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

At the Lagrange point, DSCOVR faces the same situation:

The transit of the Moon across the Earth's disk in a DSCOVR image on July 16, 2015.
(c) NASA/NOAA

To get a beautiful photo from this shoot suitable for distribution to the media, you have to work in an image editor.

There is another physical factor that not everyone knows about - black and white images have higher resolution and clarity compared to color ones. These are the so-called panchromatic images, which include all the light information that enters the camera, without cutting off any of its parts by filters. Therefore, many "long-range" satellite cameras shoot only in panchrome, which for us means black and white shots. Such a LORRI camera is installed on New Horizons, a NAC camera is installed on the LRO lunar satellite. Yes, in fact, all telescopes shoot in panchrome, unless filters are specifically used. (“NASA is obscuring the true color of the Moon” is where it came from.)

A multispectral "color" camera, equipped with filters and having a much lower resolution, can be attached to a panchromatic one. At the same time, its color images can be superimposed on panchromatic ones, as a result of which we will get high-resolution color images.

Pluto in New Horizons panchromatic and multispectral images
(c) NASA/JHU APL/Southwest Research Institute

This method is often used when surveying the Earth. If you know about this, you can see a typical halo on some frames, which leaves a blurry color frame:

Composite image of the Earth from the WorldView-2 satellite
(c) Digital Globe

It was through such an overlay that the very impressive frame of the Earth over the Moon was created, which is given above as an example of overlaying different images:

(c) NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

Additional processing

Often you have to resort to the tools of graphic editors when you need to clean up a frame before publishing. Ideas about the impeccability of space technology are not always justified, so debris on space cameras is a common thing. For example, the MAHLI camera on the Curiosity rover is simply crap, otherwise you can’t say:

Photo of Curiosity by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) in Sol 1401
(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Mote in the solar telescope STEREO-B gave rise to a separate myth about an alien space station constantly flying over the north pole of the Sun:

(c) NASA/GSFC/JHU APL

Even in space, charged particles are not uncommon, which leave their traces on the matrix in the form of separate dots or stripes. The longer the shutter speed, the more traces remain, “snow” appears on the frames, which does not look very presentable in the media, so they also try to clean it off (read: “photoshop”) before publication:

(c) NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Therefore, we can say: yes, NASA photoshops images from space. ESA photoshop. Roscosmos photoshop. ISRO Photoshop. JAXA photoshops... Only the National Space Agency of Zambia doesn't photoshop. So if someone is not satisfied with the images of NASA, then you can always use their images of space without any sign of processing.