Classes of time lasting hundreds, tens of millions, and even billions of years would possibly appear unfathomable. So Mark Chen, a photographer and trainer in Houston, made up our minds to “visualize this very mysterious thought of deep time” in additional relatable phrases: the celebs over our heads and the rocks underfoot. Since 2022, he’s been mountaineering into wild puts, together with nationwide parks, at night time and deploying a customized projector to layer NASA pictures of big name techniques onto iconic herbal formations in split-second bursts. Each and every ensuing {photograph} options a secular environment more or less as outdated, in years, as the celebs’ distance from Earth in light-years. This mix of geological and galactic views, shooting “how our planet has coexisted with the universe,” is now a part of an ongoing sequence he calls Pilgrimage of Gentle. By means of comparability, we people were right here for just a flash.Carlsbad CavernsTwenty million years in the past, subterranean drive raised the large limestone formations that space as of late’s Carlsbad Caverns, juxtaposed right here with the spiral palms of the Pinwheel galaxy 22.3 million light-years away.(Oil drilling on delicate New Mexico public lands places uncommon caves in peril.)
