Paper short abstract:

This paper presents how the creation of pretty pictures with the Hubble Space Telescope’s data by non-professionals was both exploited through the development of digital technologies and media by Space institutions and explored as an empowering activity by amateur astronomers.

Paper long abstract:

The creation of “pretty pictures” with data from the Hubble Space Telescope by non-professionals has been framed by Space institutions as an adventure for laypeople, a way to democratize astronomers’ materials and practices, and a possibility to crowdsource the work of science communicators. However, the practices of amateur astronomers are much more complex. Firstly, by circulating these materials online, amateurs live and convey a variety of good and bad experiences through their adventures with Hubble’s data. Secondly, the “tutorialization” of the use of Hubble’s data by the amateurs and the “softwarization” of the practice by the institutions are co-constitutive of its popularization and the personification of the practitioners as experts, rather than long-lasting laypeople. Thirdly, amateurs’ practices show that the images “of Hubble” are part of a wider galaxy of actors than the assembly of astronomical objects/capturing devices/data/and pretty pictures that is foregrounded in representations of science by professionals.

I will present how the creation of pretty pictures with Hubble’s data was both exploited through the development of digital technologies and media by Space institutions and explored as an individual and collective empowering activity by amateur astronomers. This academic paper is influenced by the “Sociology of uses” (Proulx, 2015) and its aim to look at both the conception and appropriation of sociotechnical innovations, and is based on an online ethnography with amateur astronomers. Its contribution to STS will be to enrich the understanding of the trajectory and transformation of data and images outside the laboratory and observatory through creative interventions.